Cemeteries have become sites of acute political contestation in the city-state of Singapore. Confronted with high population density and rapid economic growth, the government has ordered the destruction of all but one burial ground forcing people to exhume their family members. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Chinese funeral parlours and cemeteries, anthropologist and mortician Ruth E. Toulson demonstrates that as part of a large shift to transform a Daoist-infused obsession with ancestors into a sterile, more easily controlled ‘Protestant’ Buddhism. Further, in a context where the dead remains central to family life, forced exhumation tears the social fabric, turning ancestors into ghosts. Using death ritual and grieving as interrogative lenses, Toulson explores the scope of and resistance to state power over the dead, laying bare the legacies of colonialism and consequences of whirlwind capitalist development. In doing so, she offers a new anthropology of death, one both more personal and politicized.