Por, Heong Hong
(2020)
Dual Triumphalist Heritage Narrative And The Sungai Buloh Leprosy Settlement.
In:
Making Heritage in Malaysia: Sites, Histories, Identities.
Making Heritage in Malaysia: Sites, Histories, Identities
.
Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore.
ISBN 978-981-15-1493-7
Abstract
Unlike other heritage movements in Malaysia, which are largely ethnicbased
and culture obsessed (Cartier 1996; Worden 2001), the preservation
movement of the Sungai Bulah Leprosy Settlement (SBLS thereafter),
also widely referred to as the "Valley of Hope", 1 is concerned with the
conservation of a site that is associated with a socially stigmatised disease.
Built at a jungle fringe in Selangor in 1930, SBLS was constructed as a
place for the treatment, and forced isolation from wider society, of people
suffering from leprosy. Although leprosy knows no racial boundaries as
people of any background can be afflicted with the disease, nearly eighty
per cent of the patients admitted to SBLS have been ethnic Chinese. Of
the rest, about fifteen per cent were ethnic Malays with ethnic Indians
making up five per cent. Former patients who were cured but left with
differing degrees of disfigurement and disability are also residents of the
SBLS today.2 SBLS's population reached its peal<. with 2400 people in
1958, but today their number is just slightly over one hundred (JoshuaRaghavar
1983; Wong and Phang 2006).
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