Stories Made Tangible: Hell Museum in Haw Par Villa

Hell’s Museum at Haw Par Villa Park, Singapore

On our fifth (?) date, I took a guy I was seeing earlier this year to hell.

I figured that since I once made him take an evening stroll with me by the river during a tropical rainstorm, the result of bad planning and forgetting how volatile tropical weather can be, especially when you are trying to impress someone, Haw Par Villa should quite literally be a walk in the park for him.

I had other reasons to choose this venue. Since returning home, I have been meaning to pay a visit – “pay” being the operative word since they renovated the highlight of the park and constructed a mini museum with the steep admission fee of $18 per pax (@#%*!&@#!). As a repatriate who has never really been in touch with local culture, what I imagined to be a trauma-inducing rite of passage to most young Singaporean children remained a mystery to me for well over 2 decades. At least that was what I imagined to be the case for my parents’ generation, before CGI in movies and video games desensitised mine to grotesque violence and death imagery. At 25, I wasn’t likely going to have the same visceral reaction to painted wooden statues getting split apart as my then-six-year-old father (what were my grandparents thinking?), but I could still appreciate the cultural significance and the sheer ambition of a sprawling outdoor complex dedicated to life-sized depictions of Chinese legends and folklore. Epic stories playing out on an epic scale - how cool is that?

The wonderful sight of severed heads greeting us

When I arrived at the park 10 minutes early, however, I started questioning the wisdom of bringing my date along. If this is unusual for me, someone with a tenuous cultural connection to Taoism and Chinese spirituality, it must be doubly strange and disorienting to a guy from Europe, curious and open-minded as he presented himself to be. No, it’s fine, I told myself firmly. Christianity is just as gruesome, isn’t it, both the biblical events and the endless factional wars arising from constant disagreement over the scripture? Also, don’t their cathedrals have gargoyles, paintings of hell and giant Jesuses nailed to the cross? The West invented danse macabre, didn’t they? Why shouldn’t they accept our old belief systems or the way we portrayed them when my grandparents did theirs when they were converted by English missionaries decades ago?

By the time I reached the park, I’ve worked myself into an irrational fit of anger in which I scolded myself for having doubts in the first place because I shouldn’t care so much about what some white guy thinks of my culture and preemptively hated him for disliking what I was about to show him because that will just make him a stuck-up, narrow-minded, ethnocentric poopyhead and I’ve been wasting my time with him and he should have his work visa revoked! Raaaaaaage!

(He arrived five minutes later, claiming that he was excited and looking forward to the exhibit, before proceeding to read everything on the walls in the museum and make me take pictures of text we didn’t have time to process to send him later and call everything cool.)

Hell's welcome wagon

The Ten Courts are housed in a small, dark, cave-like enclosure guarded by Ox-Head and Horse-Face, as they guard Diyu (Hell) in Chinese legend. This is it, finally, I thought as I pushed the double glass doors open, my companion quietly following. The moment I’ve been waiting for for two years now. Then we were immersed in the shadowy world of misery and punishment, gruesome scenes from the eponymous Ten Courts playing out in stages hewn out of the cave’s stone walls and bathed in garish lights: sinners writhing, crying, pleading or screaming as they are thrown in lakes of blood, crushed by boulders, disemboweled, sawn in half. Soaking in all these dramatic and intricate tableaus as well as the blessed air-conditioning, an unexpected perk to find in hell, I momentarily forgot about the $36 I had to pay (dude will pay for dinner later, like he paid for all our meals together anyway). No, that’s a lie, because the a/c maintenance fee is probably what most of the money is going to. But considering that it’s good for artwork preservation and that my friend and I had been traipsing under the hot sun until now, they can take it.

My favourite part of this journey into the underworld is making out as many details as I could, not just in the tableaus but on all the other surfaces of the cave, for the whole cave is the theatre: pillars as trees of knives from which mutilated bodies dangle, witnesses looking on from their high perch on the walls above eye level and mirroring the flesh-and-blood visitors swarming below, bodies boiling in a “lake” beneath our feet as we crossed a short bridge between two courts.

Court 6 in Ten Courts of Hell

I also enjoyed poring over the ridiculous signboards in all the courts with my date, which nonchalantly listed sins but infuriatingly did not elaborate on them, and the fate sinners earned for committing them. The sins ranged from minor vices all of us would be guilty of – gossiping and spreading rumors, swearing, gambling, cheating on exams - to objectively reprehensible crimes like rape and murder, which in my opinion were not allotted as grisly of a punishment. I know pain is subjective, but based on the rather blasé text available, I’d take the punishment for sexual assault (getting my head and arms chopped off) than the one for arguing with my parents (grounding by stone) or tax evasion (my chest sliced open) any day.

To give you a further idea of why we were so bewildered: according to King Pingzheng, ruler of the 8th Court of Hell, sneaking a peek over your classmate’s shoulder while taking tests is as bad as breaking your family’s heart; both warrants having your intestines pulled out. I don’t know exactly what “harming others to benefit oneself” means, whether it is serious like actively plotting someone’s murder or something as petty as talking crap about them, but it will end in a continuous dismemberment.

Yes, I made a whole ppt deck. It really was a research trip! (Which probably makes me a bad date come to think of it).

Also, did you know you can go to hell for “using curse words” and “possessing pornography”? You get thrown onto knives and your body sawn in half, respectively.

At the end of our tour, we both agreed that we are all screwed.

I wanted to take him further through the park, where you can see real turtles and carps swimming in irregular ponds amidst sculptures of bearded sages and snail women, but at that point we got hungry and the Hell Museum logo reminded us too much of a steakhouse, so we left in search of a protein-heavy dinner.

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Next up: Triptych art in St Mary’s Basilica, Poland.