There is a pair of quite abandoned tombs in Bukit Brown, next to the resting place of our MM Lee’s grandfather Lee Hoon Leong.
If one was to look at the inscriptions carefully, one would be shocked to find that the inscription mentioned the 72nd generation of Confucius family.
The genealogy has now reached more than 81 generation and 3 million descendants.
If you are to take a look at the inscriptions, you can see two names : Lie Sio Nio and Kung Tian Siong.
At the funeral
You can see Mr T S Kung standing at the funeral
On the tomb, it was listed 3 daughters including Kung Kim Neo, Kung Ghim Neo and Kung Gek Neo, and 3 sons in law
including Tan Hock San.
Taken from Linda Lim’s MGS SCHOOLDAYS
My Family at MGS
The first person from my family to study at the Methodist GirlsSchool (MGS) was my great-grandmother, Siauw Mah Li.
The daughter of a Kapitan China (leader of the Chinese community) in Medan, Sumatra (then colonized by the Dutch),
she was "adopted" at the age of six by Sophia Blackmore, the Australian missionary who in 1887 founded the Methodist Girls' School in Singapore
for the American Methodist Mission.
Mah Li’s mother was ill (and died shortly thereafter), and her father wanted her to have a proper education and to learn English, so he brought her to Miss Blackmore. In an
article in the April 1899 issue of Malaysia Message about Nind Home on Mount Sophia,where Mah Li, and later her daughters, boarded while studying at MGS next door,
Miss Blackmore wrote:
Two of our girls have married from the home. The first was Mah Li, who was brought to me by her father in 1887. She grew up in our home, was baptised on
Christmas Day 1892, and was one of the first members of our Malay Church. For several years Mah Li has been a successful teacher. Her husband is an
earnest Christian and an active worker. His mother is not a Christian, and her friends tell her that her children are lost to her because they are Christians.
I cannot see how that can be, she replies. First, my children do not gamble.
They do not smoke opium. They do not go to places of iniquity and my daughter-in-law does not spend all her time dressing up before a looking-glass, but keeps
her eyes open to see how she can help me.
Miss Blackmore’s report is cited in my ACS teacher Earnest Lau’s column, A Page from the Past, entitled Training for life: Young girls picked up skills to be good
homemakers, in the Methodist Message, April 1998, with the photo below of Mah Li with her eldest daughter Kim Neo. Footnotes note that Mah Li was the first Chinese girl
at MGS, that she taught there, and that her husband, T.S. Kung, was an active preacher.
Mah Li apparently met my great-grandfather, Kung Tian Siong, in church. He was born in 1876 in Malacca, educated at the Anglo-Chinese School in Singapore (the male
equivalent of MGS), and set up the first cinema in Singapore, the Empire Cinema in Tanjong Pagar.
Before he died in 1958, he was an occasional lay preacher at the Geylang Methodist Church in Singapore, where he gave sermons in English and Malay.
My great-grandparents had three daughters: Darling Kim Neo, Susie Gin Neo, and Edna Gek Neo, my maternal grandmother who died in Singapore in October 2003 at the age of
93. My grandmother and her two older sisters spent only a brief time in Nind Home. By the time I was in school in the 1950s, the house was used for other purposes by the
Methodist church which owned it, and was rumored to be "haunted".
Mah Li later became a schoolteacher at the Ipoh MGS where, according to my grandmother, she apparently
gave evening lessons in Arabic—perhaps the Malay Jawi script--to Chinese and Malay men. Her letters to my grandmother that we have are written in perfect English and in the
most beautiful handwriting script. She died in Ipoh in 1934.
The eldest daughter of Lie Sio Nio, Kung Kim Neo, wife of Tan Tock San, died in 1935
We can confirm from the above that Siauw Mah Li = Li Sio Nio, whereby the Mah is honorific and the name is actually Li Sio Nio (Neo). She died in 1926 and not in 1934
Kung Tian Siong was honoured as a descendant of Confucius in the past. So was his equally famous brother Kung Tian Cheng.
Direct descendants of Confucius alive today, and T S Kung is the head,
The anniversary of the birthday of Confucius will be celebrated on 27 Aug 1934.
Lie Sio Nio died on 12 Oct 1926.
10 years later, T S Kung placed a memoriam for his dear Nona:
Although the grave is a twin tomb, when Kung Tien Siong died in 1958, he was not buried with his beloved wife Nona, although
his name was already inscribed there.
Instead he was buried at Bidadari.
And so, let us today remember this 72th generation of the Confucius family, and also the beautiful Nona, daughter of a Kapitan,
and the first Chinese girl in MGS in Bukit Brown cemetery, burial ground of our Singapore pioneers and forefathers and foremothers.
