Singapore is losing its old Chinatown

Press, 24 September 1983, Page 17

Singapore is losing its old Chinatown

From

JOHN THOMAS,

Reuter, in Singapore

Singapore’s Chinatown has attracted millions of foreign visitors, including Queen Elizabeth 11, but now it faces extinction. The lifestyles and traditions of the island’s early settlers, reflected by Chinatown for more than 150 years, are about to disappear. The old Chinese settlement is being emptied for a transformation that will reflect the modern industrial and commercial city Singapore has become since independence in 1965. The Government has ordered some 100,000 residents to move out of their dilapitateed homes and shops which have been earmarked for redevelopment Officials say the Government is considering suggestions that it should preserve at least a few pockets of Chinatown but older residents and conservationists with an eye for the quaint are unconsoled.

Chinatown was built on the orders of Singapore’s founder, Sir Stamford Raffles, not long after he established the British East India Company’s trading post in 1819. It has kept much of its original character, old-timers refusing to be attracted by the island’s rapid modernisation. Even the Second World War and the Japanese military occupation failed to alter it It was this timeless quality which drew Queen Elizabeth to stroll through Chinatown’s streets when she visited her former colony in 1972. Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and dozens of other foreign dignitaries have since made similar trips.

Business is the Chinatown. Shells and shops clog jhe roads and alleys, criss-crossing tne 2.6 square

kilometre settlement These ramshackle shops selling anything from snake meat to pocket calculators will go first. They are to be relocated in Gov-ernment-built market and shopping complexes scattered over the island. Some of the stallkeepers and their families may never go back into business after moving into high-rise apartments. Life will never be the same again for them or Chinatown. “We were born here and this is home for us. We don’t want to do business in the basement of a market complex. It would be like going to hell We like doing business at road level,” says Ah Lan, aged 60, a vegetable seller on Sago Street.

Nowhere else in orderly Singapore can one find a street totally blocked to traffic because itinerant and semi-permanent vegetable sellers ply their wares all day long. Some 800 vegetable stalls, run almost completely by women, choke Sago Street and adjoining by-lanes. “Women work and men idle — that is the way in Chinatown,” a woman says with a toothless smile.

Chinatown is also a shopping paradise for the island’s 2.5 million people, mostly ethnic Chinese. Its 2000 stalls provide special delicacies, and most shops are open late into the night - Dozens of stalls do roaring business in turtles, alligators, snakes, and mice. Turtia soup is believed to give the drinker strong legs;

alligator is good for asthma. Many Chinatown residents will tell you that swallowing newborn mice is a sure way to cure gastric ulcers. Dingy little factories turn out Peking ducks by the hundreds and a variety of rice noodles for hotels and restaurants. Business has thrived because goods are cheap and sometimes can be bought only in Chinatown. Stall owners on the road pay no rents or income tax. Chinatown also has some of Singapore’s oldest buildings. Its shop-houses were built in the 1800 s and some have Portuguese stained glass windows.

On the upper floors of an average shop-house are four or five rooms with a small kitchen and bathroom. Living in each of these 3 metre by 3 metre rooms is an extended family of about 10 people spanning three generations.

Many old Chinatown residents are sad they cannot spend their last days in their forefathers’ homes and are now celebrating the annual “Festival of the hungry ghosts” for the last time there. The business life of the area is also slowly coming to a grinding halt. Sago Lane, a street of funeral parlours, is empty except for one shop selling the last of its stock of paper replicas of material wealth which the living burn ceremoniously to send to their ancestors in heaven.

As people start packing to leave, bulldozers and shovels wait to begin creating a nej> world out of old Chinatown. ’’