On 13 March 2015, the residents of Yishun bid farewell to the bus interchange they were so familiar with. The departure of the last bus meant that it was time to say goodbye to the Yishun Bus Interchange that had served the town well in the past 28 years. The premises will be demolished in near future to make way for the new Integrated Transport Hub (ITH) at Northpoint City, which will be made up of North Park Residences, an air-conditioned bus interchange and a shopping underpass that links to the Yishun MRT Station.

In 1977, the Singapore government launched the Yishun New Town project, reserving some 920 hectares of land between Admiralty and Sembawang Roads for residential and industrial development. By the early eighties, there was a sizable population living at Yishun New Town; many of the residents originated from the nearby villages such as Nee Soon, Chye Kay and Mandai.

A large bus interchange became essential to meet the demands of an increasing population in Yishun. Before the construction of the old Yishun Bus Interchange in the mid-eighties, the Yishun residents had to be contended with the two bus terminals located at the Yishun Central and Yishun Avenue 5. Slow and irregular bus services made commuting between new towns and the city area tedious and inconvenient. The small terminals also faced difficulties in coping with the rising number of commuters, and basic amenities such as coin-changing machines were absent.

The Housing Development Board (HDB) was thus given the task to build a permanent facility to provide bus services at Yishun. In August 1985, tenders were issued and awarded to contractors for the construction of the new bus interchange.

In just two years, the Yishun Bus Interchange was completed and ready for operation. Officially opened on 23 August 1987, it was the ninth bus interchange built in Singapore after Bukit Merah, Clementi, Woodlands, Ang Mo Kio, Hougang, Bedok, Jurong East and Toa Payoh. Four more bus interchanges at Bukit Batok, Tampines, Serangoon and Bishan were added by the early nineties.

Costing a total of $2 million in construction, the new bus interchange, painted with an eye-catching purple appearance, consisted of 36 bus parking berths, 24 boarding/alighting bays and a staff office. Shortly after its opening, HDB handed the management of the new bus interchange to the Trans Island Bus Services (TIBS) for a token of $1.

The Trans Island Bus Services was established in 1982 to provide competition to the Singapore Bus Services (SBS), which was formed earlier in 1973 after the merger of the three largest private bus companies in Amalgamated Bus Company (ABC), Associated Bus Services (ABS) and United Bus Company (UBC). Running its own fleet of yellow-and-orange buses, TIBS was given the exclusive right to operate in the northern part of Singapore such as Woodlands, Yishun and Sembawang. Its services were later extended to Bukit Panjang, Jalan Kayu and Punggol.

In 2001, TIBS merged and became a subsidiary of the SMRT Corporation, which took over the management of the bus interchanges at Woodlands and Yishun. TIBS officially walked into history three years later when its fleet of buses were painted red and renamed under the SMRT brand.

The early bus services by TIBS were mostly the 800-series. New bus services were later added constantly to provide wider convenience to the commuters in getting to other towns and housing districts. A daily one-way service No 825, for example, was introduced in 1988 to ferry commuters between the Yishun Bus Interchange and Ang Mo Kio Avenue 6 at a frequency of 10 minutes from 6am to 830pm. The bus fares for the One-Man-Operation (OMO) service ranged between 40c and 60c for adults and 25c for children.

The new Yishun Integrated Transport Hub is expected to be ready by 2019. A temporary bus interchange, located on the opposite side of Yishun Central 1, has been made available for the commuters’ ease of convenience for the next four years. Upon its completion, the Yishun ITH will be the tenth integrated transport hub in Singapore. The other nine ITHs are located at Ang Mo Kio, Bedok, Boon Lay, Bukit Panjang, Clementi, Joo Koon, Serangoon, Sengkang and Toa Payoh.

Published: 16 March 2015

On 23 March 2015, Singapore fell into a grieving state as Lee Kuan Yew, widely regarded as the country’s founding father, passed away at the age of 91 at the Singapore General Hospital (SGH). The former prime minister had been battling an infection due to severe pneumonia, and was warded in the intensive care unit since early February. He left behind two sons (current Prime Minister of Singapore Lee Hsien Loong and Lee Hsien Yang) and a daughter (Lee Wei Ling).

The Beginnings

Lee Kuan Yew was born in 1923 in a Hakka Chinese family living at Kampong Java Road. His great-grandfather had arrived at Singapore in the late 19th century from the Dapu county of Guangdong, China. After completing his primary education, Lee Kuan Yew attended Raffles Institution and Raffles College (present-day National University of Singapore), where he became the top student in Singapore and Malaya.

After the Second World War, Lee Kuan Yew went to study law at England’s prestigious University of Cambridge, graduating with double First Class Honours. It was also at London where he met and married Kwa Geok Choo (1920-2010). In 1949, Lee Kuan Yew returned to Singapore with his wife, working as a lawyer and a legal advisor to trade and students’ unions.

Entering Politics

It was in the fifties when Lee Kuan Yew began involved in politics. In 1954, Lee Kuan Yew, together with Toh Chin Chye, Goh Keng Swee, Devan Nair, S. Rajaratnam and Abdul Samad Ismail, founded the People’s Action Party (PAP) with a mission to seek Singapore’s independence from Britain through merger with the Federation of Malaya. Together with his comrades, mostly made up of lawyers, journalists and trade unionists, Lee Kuan Yew aimed to establish a corruption-free and democratic government in-charge of a multi-racial society that would be harmonious and fair.

In its early days of formation, English-speaking Lee Kuan Yew and his PAP had to work closely with the pro-communist members in order to gain support of the local Chinese, most of which could only communicate in Mandarin and dialects. Lim Chin Siong (1933-1996), the leader of the pro-communist faction, was influential in helping PAP to gain mass support. The cooperation, however, ended in 1961 due to different political ideas. Lim Chin Siong would leave PAP to lead the opposition party Barisan Socialis (Socialist Front).

In 1959, after three rounds of Constitutional Talks with London, Singapore was granted internal self-governance. PAP would win most of the seats in the general election held that year to become Singapore’s ruling party, with Lee Kuan Yew becoming the Prime Minister of the self-government. He would become the Prime Minister of the State of Singapore when PAP won another general election after the merger with Malaysia in 1963.

The merger, however, was short-lived. Between PAP and the Malaysian leaders, there was an ideological divide over the nature of the Malaysian society. PAP wanted to build a fair and just multi-racial society – a Malaysian Malaysia, but the Malaysian leaders insisted special privileges be given to the Malay majority.

The uncompromisable differences meant that Singapore had to exit the federation, and on 9 August 1965, Lee Kuan Yew tearfully announced on television Singapore’s separation from Malaysia: “You see, the whole of my adult life, I have believed in merger and the unity of these two territories. You know that we, as a people are connected by geography, economics, by ties of kinship“

Singapore’s Independence

Lee Kuan Yew believed Singapore, a nation with limited natural resources, would require strong diplomatic relationship with other countries in order to survive. Shortly after independence, Singapore joined the United Nations (UN) and became a member of the Commonwealth. In August 1967, Singapore, together with Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines, formed the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) with the objectives to promote economic development, social progress and regional stability against the influx of communism.

The Singapore-Indonesia ties, however, had been deeply soured due to the execution of the two Indonesian saboteurs who were involved in the MacDonald House bombing during the Konfrontasi (1963-1966). After a brief discussion with former Singapore’s Ambassador to Indonesia Lee Khoon Choy (born 1924), Lee Kuan Yew, on his official visit to Indonesia in 1973, decided to pay respect at the Jakarta Kalibata Heroes Cemetery by sprinkling flowers onto the graves of the two Indonesian marines. The move clearly won the hearts of many Indonesians who held strong Javanese beliefs in souls and clear conscience.

Many Indonesian newspapers carried headlines describing Lee Kuan Yew as a magnanimous person. This helped to break the ice between the leaders of Singapore and Indonesia. Trust between the two countries were gradually restored, and for the next two decades, Singapore and Indonesia enjoyed a peaceful and beneficial bilateral ties. Lee Kuan Yew also maintained a close friendship with Suharto, the President of Indonesia between 1967 and 1998, until the latter died in 2008.

Beyond Southeast Asia, Singapore was also actively establishing diplomatic relations with the major countries in the world. Bilateral ties with The United States and Japan were established shortly after the country’s independence.

Lee Kuan Yew also placed importance on good Sino-Singapore relations. He first visited China in 1976. Until 2011, Lee Kuan Yew had made a total of 33 official trips to China, and was one of the few in the world who had met all five Chinese leaders in Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping.

National Interests

Lee Kuan Yew had demanded efficiency and capability in his government. In the sixties and seventies, his team of Goh Keng Swee (1918-2010), Toh Chin Chye (1921-2012), Lim Kim San (1916-2006), Othman Wok (born 1924), Ong Pang Boon (born 1929), S Rajaratnam (1915-2006), Hon Sui Sen (1916-1983) and Dr Albert Winsemius (1910-1996, Singapore’s Chief Economic Advisor between 1961 and 1984) was able to successfully tackle the urgent issues Singapore was facing, such as inadequate housing, national defense and economic struggles. Lee Kuan Yew himself also placed great emphasis on the ground, regularly visiting villagers living on both mainland Singapore and the outlying islands, to understand their concerns.

Over the years, Lee Kuan Yew had built up a no-nonsensical reputation although some viewed him as a tough leader ruling with an iron fist. He made it clear many times that he would not allow any events to affect the country’s stability and undermine national interests.

This was demonstrated in late 1980, when a strike by the Singapore Airlines Pilots Association’s (SIApa) expatriate pilots threatened to escalate into a crisis. The month-long strike for higher pays and better benefits had already disrupted many international flights. With the 1980 General Election around the corner, Lee Kuan Yew stepped in and confronted the pilots with an uncompromising stand. He demanded, in one of his rally speeches, that the pilots end their strike: “I will, by every means at my disposal, teach you, and get the people of Singapore help me teach you, a lesson you won’t forget. And I’m prepared to start all over again. Or stop it!“

The pilots eventually backed down. SIApa was de-registered a year later, and 15 leaders that incited the strike were charged and convicted. Even after he retired as the Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew would intervene again, this time as the Senior Minister, when a group of SIA pilots threatened to strike over disputed pay-raise in 2004.

A Garden City

Tourism had a difficult start in post-independent Singapore as it did not have many attractions. Lee Kuan Yew believed that Singapore could be different from other developing countries in a practical way. In 1963, Lee Kuan Yew planted his first tree. He kept his tree-planting tradition every year, and it later evolved into an islandwide campaign. Today, there are 2 million trees planted around Singapore, meeting Lee Kuan Yew’s original vision of Singapore being a well-known Garden City.

The cleaning up of the Singapore River was also one of Lee Kuan Yew’s proposals of a clean and green Singapore. Before the seventies, the Singapore River had a notorious reputation of being an extremely dirty and polluted waterway at the country’s commercial district. In 1977, Lee Kuan Yew issued a challenge to his Environment ministry: “It should be a way of life to keep the water clean. To keep every stream, culvert and rivulet, free from pollution.” “The Ministry of Environment should make it a target: In 10 years let us have fishing in the Singapore River and Kallang River. It can be done.“

The enormous task was given to Lee Ek Tieng (born 1934), the former chairman of the Public Utilities Board and then Environment Ministry Permanent Secretary, and his team. It took 10 years for the Singapore River and Kallang Basin to be successfully cleared of pollutants. By the mid-eighties, the river and its banks were no longer filled with garbage, bumboats, squatters and stench.

Bilingualism

A language genius, Lee Kuan Yew was proficient in English and Malay, and understood Latin and Japanese. He once addressed the Malaysian parliament in perfect Bahasa Melayu that surprised many Malaysian leaders.

In his thirties, Lee Kuan Yew also learnt and mastered Mandarin and Hokkien in order to reach out to the masses in Singapore, much of it were made up of Chinese Singaporeans. After 1970s, he, however, stopped using Hokkien in his public speeches because he wanted Mandarin to become the common language of the Chinese Singaporeans. The Speak Mandarin Campaign that his government promoted aggressively in the eighties eventually led to the demise of Chinese dialects in Singapore.

Creating a bilingual society was what Lee Kuan Yew had in mind. While retaining one’s mother tongue, Lee Kuan Yew believed English should be the common language among different races in Singapore. This would give the country an advantage in the international arena. Thus, in the eighties, schools with Malay-, Chinese- and Tamil-medium classes were gradually phased out and replaced by English as the compulsory first language.

Lasting Legacy

In his political career, Lee Kuan Yew admitted making several bad judgements such as the shutting down of Nanyang University, population control and the Graduate Mothers’ Scheme launched in the eighties. His government’s tight control of the media and suppression of political dissent also drew criticism.

However, his achievements and contributions to Singapore far exceeded his political blemishes. For that, Lee Kuan Yew would be fondly remembered as the great man behind Singapore’s success and prosperity today. His unquestionable legacy as the founding father of modern Singapore will live on for many generations to come. For the city-state which will be celebrating its Golden Jubilee in the coming August, it is a monumental loss.

“I have no regrets. I have spent my life, so much on it, building up this country. There’s nothing more that I need to do. At the end of the day, what have I got? A successful Singapore. What have I given up? My life.” – Lee Kuan Yew, 2014

Published: 23 March 2015

There are several major war memorials in Singapore, located at Kranji, Bukit Batok, City Hall and the Esplanade Park. Not many are aware that there is actually a small war memorial at the Singapore General Hospital (SGH), located along College Road and opposite the College of Medicine Building (present-day Ministry of Health). The SGH war memorial was set up in remembrance of the eleven medical students from the King Edward VII College of Medicine, who were brutally killed during the Second World War.

On 14 February 1942, a medical student Yoong Tatt Sin, also the general secretary of the Medical College Union, was killed while on duty when the Japanese invaders bombed Tan Tock Seng Hospital. Later that evening, his grieving friends and colleagues, a group of 25 medical students, brought his body to the General Hospital at Outram Road (present-day Singapore General Hospital) to give him a proper burial.

Five trenches facing the College of Medicine Building had been dug for air raid purposes. As there was little time in preparation, one of the trenches was converted to a grave for Yoong Tatt Sin. During the funeral procession, the Japanese arrived and began intensive shelling at the students. Ten students were killed; others were wounded while fleeing and taking cover at the nearby buildings and the trenches. One of the causalities was Hera Singh, a prominent sportsman, school prefect and the captain of the V.I. Cricket in the late 1930s.

Singapore surrendered to the Japanese on 15 February 1942. The next morning, the eleven dead students were hastily buried at the trenches where most of them fell and died during the shelling, along with some other military casualties during the battles.

Between 1942 and 1945, the General Hospital was used as the main surgical hospital for the Japanese forces stationed at Southeast Asia. The College of Medical Building was converted into a department of bacteriology and serology used by the Japanese Army Medical Corps. In 1943, the Japanese established the Syonan Medical College (called Marei Ika Daigaku in Japanese) at Tan Tock Seng Hospital, which was later moved to Malacca until the end of the Second World War.

After the war, the British colonial government erected a memorial along College Road, made up of a red cross with a granite base, in remembrance of the British soldiers and civilians who had perished during the occupation. In 1948, Dr G. V. Allen, the principal of King Edward VI College of Medicine between 1939 and 1942, unveiled a war memorial plaque inscribed with the names of the eleven dead students (Yoong Tatt Sin, Mabel Luther, N.P. Sarathee, E. Baptist, H.E. Oorjithan, Ling Ding Ee, Hera Singh Bul, Chan Kok Loon, Chen Kok Kuang, Teoh Tiaw Teong and Abdul Hamid Bin Mohd Yusoff).

The plaque was first hung at the Harrower Hall. It was later relocated twice before settled at the College of Medicine Building, where it remains today.

Published: 12 April 2015

Lorong Bistari was one of the numerous roads that were expunged in the late eighties and early nineties due to the development of Choa Chu Kang New Town (Choa Chu Kang North, or Yew Tee today) and the expansion of the Kranji army camps.

The remaining 50m stretch of Lorong Bistari, off Choa Chu Kang Way, is still visible today, although it is no longer listed in most modern maps and street directories. The defunct road, along with its several old lamp posts, has been gradually forgotten. Other roads such as Lorong Chembol, Lorong Keduang and Lorong Puyu had long completely disappeared into history, while part of Lorong Kebasi (where the former Yew Tee Community Centre once stood) and Lorong Limbang (which gave rise to the naming of Limbang, one of the neigbourhoods at Choa Chu Kang North) were absorbed into the restricted premises of Kranji Camp.

Choa Chu Kang was a different picture in the sixties and seventies, where pig, poultry and vegetable farms were abundant. On the opposite side of Woodlands Road, there were granite mills and crushing plants for the Mandai Quarry, providing ample job opportunities for the villagers living in the vicinity. At Lorong Bistari, small businesses such as hardware shops and sawmills lined up along the road; Guan Seng, one of the sawmills, was destroyed in a fire in 1973. An estimated 150 tons of wooden planks and boards, reported to be worth $80,000, were consumed by the flames.

The Jurong Town Corporation (JTC) started developing a small light industrial estate at Choa Chu Kang North in the early eighties. It was named Yew Tee Industrial Estate, and was made up of rows of double-storey terrace workshops built in the area bounded by Woodlands Road, Stagmont Ring, the railway tracks and Peng Sua Canal. To boost the industry, parcels of vacant lands near Lorong Bistari, between 30,000 and 60,000 square feet, were made available for lease to small factories.

The Choa Chu Kang New Town was developed in the late eighties. By 1991, as many as 35,000 housing units were ready. However, Choa Chu Kang North, or Yew Tee, was not yet developed as a residential district, even though main roads such as Choa Chu Kang Way were already laid by the late eighties. It was only after the completion and opening of Yew Tee MRT Station in 1996 that the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) decided to carry out its Development Guide Plan to transform Choa Chu Kang North into a modern new town.

To provide a greater ease of accessibility to the new town, a new expressway called Kranji Expressway (KJE) was constructed in the early nineties, linking Choa Chu Kang, Bukit Panjang and Bukit Batok to both the Pan-Island Expressway (PIE) and Bukit Timah Expressway (BKE). Part of the original Stagmont Ring was used as a section of KJE that cut through Choa Chu Kang and split it into northern and southern portions. It took a total of $128 million and four years for KJE to be fully operational ready in 1994.

Published: 20 April 2015

Many former National Servicemen who did their BMTs (Basic Military Trainings) at Nee Soon Camp would remember Transit Road, the short link between the army camp and the main Sembawang Road.

Despite the limited space, Transit Road used to house a row of shops that sold a wide variety of products from military apparels to electronic appliances. It used to served Nee Soon Village too, which was located a stone’s throw away at the junction of Mandai and Sembawang Roads, until the late eighties.

Records show that shops had been plying their trades at Transit Road since 1945. After the war, many locals opened shops at Transit Road to provide delivery and courier services for the British servicemen stationed at Nee Soon Camp, who would send food and gift parcels back to their families at Britain, often on a weekly basis.

Brands and names of shops that had operated at Transit Road in the past six decades might ring a bell to some, including Nee Soon Bar, Yong Lee Provision Shop and Lucky Store to Paris Silk Store, Hock Gift Shop, Rambo Gift Shop and Danny Tattoo, the last batch of shops before the premises were demolished.

Fire Hazards

Clusters of attap and wooden huts used to exist behind the shophouses in the seventies, where they housed many families. The vicinity was prone to fire hazards, and were hit by several fire accidents that affected the livelihoods of many residents and shopkeepers in the seventies and eighties.

A large fire broke out on an early morning in June 1977, sweeping through the shops and huts rapidly. The fire engines only arrived 30 minutes later. More than $1 million worth of goods and properties were destroyed, and at least 12 families were rendered homeless. In mid-1985, another fire burned down a bookshop and two tailor shops at Transit Road. $30,000 worth of goods had gone up in flames; the old bookshop, operating since the sixties, never did recover after the incident.

A Case Within a Case

In 1986, Transit Road again appeared in the headlines when six shops were consumed by a raging fire that cost damages of almost $1 million. Two men died in the fire; the case was classified by the police as arson-murder.

Forensic tests and police investigations were conducted; the results showed that the two victims might be the ones committing the arson, but they themselves were trapped and killed by the engulfing flames. It was later discovered that the owners of London Bazaar, an electronic shop at Transit Road, had hired the two men to burn down their shop in order to cheat the insurance company for $330,000. The owners were eventually sentenced to three years’ imprisonment in 1988.

Mini Orchard Road

In the late eighties, perhaps thanks to marketing, Transit Road was dubbed by the media as a mini Orchard Road. The dozen shops received roaring businesses from many New Zealanders and Australians who were the former servicemen at Singapore’s military bases. The competitive prices offered for goods such as electronics, luggage, toys and sport gears also lured the tourists to Transit Road, which had its shophouses refurbished after the disastrous fire in 1986.

Comparing to the “official” shopping belt at Orchard, the shops at Transit Road offered prices of their products at 20% or more cheaper. In addition, the vicinity had hassle-free parking and low pressure “country-style selling”. Besides the tourists, the SAF (Singapore Army Forces) soldiers from the nearby Nee Soon and Kahtib Camps, and residents from neighbouring estates such as Seletar Hills also provided sufficient crowds to keep the shops busy seven days a week.

Decline and Demolition

The hype soon faded in the nineties, but the shops still enjoyed businesses from the NSFs who served their BMTs at Nee Soon Camp. This changed in the late nineties, when the new SAF BMTC (Basic Military Training Centre) was opened at Pulau Tekong. All newly enlisted recruits were no longer trained at Nee Soon Camp; the crowds passing through Transit Road became considerably reduced.

Like the Beach Road Army Market, the gift shops at Transit Road, selling mostly military supplies and apparels, saw their businesses declined since SAF introduced the concept of eMarts and their credit system in 1997. The electrical appliance-selling Lucky Store was the oldest shop in the vicinity, having operating at Transit Road since 1948. Danny Tattoo Art, another old name, was in the business since the seventies.

The former kopitiam, located at the end of the row of shops, had already been demolished and replaced in 2004 by the Forest Hills Condominium. A decade later, at the end of April 2015, the Transit Road shops will face the exact fate. It has been the same story for many old places elsewhere in Singapore, where they were torn down for private residential projects. This has become an increasing and worrying trend especially in the recent years.

Published: 27 April 2015

It was a name that was inspired from the splendid panoramic view of the MacRitchie Reservoir. It was also previously well-known for its popular hawker centre and market that were situated opposite Thomson Community Centre in the eighties and nineties. But for the past decade, the name Lakeview has been gradually forgotten, apart from the three brown HUDC (Housing and Urban Development Company) flats and a couple of shops along Upper Thomson Road that still carry the name.

Today, it is an empty plot of land that is barely noticeable along the main road of Upper Thomson. But in the eighties and nineties, it was a small bustling estate with HDB flats, hawker centre, wet market and rows of shops that was collectively known as Lakeview Shopping Centre, a name that was commonly used to refer to such HDB-owned and -managed neighhourhood hubs. Similar concepts can also be found in other parts of Singapore; the Boon Lay Shopping Centre, Balestier Hill Shopping Centre and Keat Hong Shopping Centre are some of such neighbourhood hubs that survive till today.

Before its demolition in the late nineties, there was a total of 13 blocks of double-storey HDB (Housing & Development Board) flats and a hawker centre cum wet market at Lakeview. The rows of shops, that were dubbed Lakeview Shopping Centre, were located at Block 5 and 7. Today, the only remnant of the “shopping centre” is a flight of steps on the sloped ground that leads to the pedestrian pavement along Upper Thomson Road.

Block 9 housed the popular hawker centre and wet market, where residents from the nearby neighbourhoods came to make their daily purchases of vegetables, fresh fish and other groceries from the dozens of stalls. Others came to enjoy their breakfasts, or simply a glass of thick kopi to start the day. Every morning, it was a busy scene at the hawker centre and market, filled with bargaining, chit-chatting and, occasionally, bickering over trivial matters.

The hawker centre was also well-known for some of its delicious local delights too, such as the chye tow kueh (carrot cake), bak kut teh, Hokkien mee and char kway teow. When the hawker centre and market were demolished, some of the stallholders were relocated to the nearby Shunfu hawker centre.

Before its development, Lakeview was formerly a Chinese cemetery known as Hylam Sua, literally means “Hainanese Hill”. Thomson Village was on the opposite side of the cemetery, scattered along Upper Thomson Road, Min Hock Road and Soon Hock Road. Both Min Hock and Soon Hock Roads were expunged in the early eighties, when Shunfu (named after Soon Hock Road) Estate was constructed.

A street away from Hylam Sua was the Thomson Garden Estate, commonly known as gor ba keng (五百间, “five hundreds houses” in Hokkien). It was also where Heap Hoe Rubber Factory was previously situated.

Another prominent landmark near Lakeview was the Long House, which was closed in early 2014 after its owner sold the property for $45 million. In the early 1960s, the site was owned by oil giant Shell, which had operated a petrol station there. The premises switched hands in 1980, and was subsequently leased out by its new owner to the American fast food chain A&W (until the late eighties) and local food court operator Kopitiam Group. After 2000, it became better known as the Long House Food Centre.

The HUDC (Housing and Urban Development Company) was introduced in 1974 to allow the sandwiched middle-class Singaporeans, deemed to be stuck in between affordable HDB flats and expensive private homes, to “have a stake in the country” by having the chance to own upscale public housings. Many of the HUDC estates were exclusively located, including the three tall blocks at Lakeview near the MacRitchie Reservoir. It was developed during the HUDC Phase I/II period, between 1974 and 1981.

The development of HUDC estates (Phase III/IV) was taken over by the HDB in 1982, but by the mid-eighties, the popularity of HUDC flats began to wane. In 1987, the scheme was halted. Overall, a total of eighteen HUDC estates with 7,731 units was constructed.

In 1995, the government allowed the privatisation of HUDC flats, if there was 75% consensus among the owners. The Gillman Heights, Pine Grove and Ivory Heights were the first HUDC estates to be privatised, between 1996 and 1998. Lakeview Estate was privatised in 2003. Braddell View was the last of the HUDC estates, in 2014, to undergo privatisation, symbolically spelling the end of the HUDC era.

The privatisation of the HUDC estates does have its advantage. Singapore’s last remaining sand-based adventure playground can be found at the compound of Lakeview Estate. Such children playgrounds were once a common sight in Singapore in the eighties and nineties, but most of them have been demolished and replaced by the new playgrounds.

Published: 17 May 2015

Provision shops. Once a common sight in Singapore, having reached its peak in the mid-seventies with more than 2,000 of them scattered all around the country. As development gathered pace, and shopping of groceries made easier with the opening of modern supermarkets, mini-marts and convenience stores, many traditional provision shops are facing an uncertain future. Today, less than 150 provision shops are still in business. Many have been struggling with the stiffer competition and lack of successors. The iconic Tian Kee, located at Dakota Crescent for more than 50 years, had pulled down its shutters for the final time two years ago.

While many of the traditional provision shops are located among the HDB flats, there is a special one worth mentioning, one that is housed in an old-styled single-storey bungalow with a blue zinc roof at the junction of Rosyth and Sandilands Roads, off Yio Chu Kang Road. Named Tee Seng Store, it is one of the few landed properties in Singapore that also serves as a provision shop.

Tee Seng Store was established in the fifties. The owner of the shop, Mr Ang, first worked there in 1955 after completing his primary education. He later took over the business from his former boss. And for almost half a century, he has been faithfully running his humble shop that doubles as his long-time home with his wife, where the 6,000 square feet property is partitioned into a shop, bedroom and kitchen. Now in his 70s, it is a matter of time before Mr Ang retires. With his three children not keen to continue the business, his vintage provision shop, like many others, will likely walk into the history.

Tee Seng Store serves mainly the landed houses around Rosyth Road, thus it is common to see domestic maids doing their grocery purchases every day. From their regular contacts, Mr Ang is able to pick up several languages over the years, including English, Bahasa Indonesian, Thai, Tagalog and Vietnamese.

Like most traditional provision shops, Tee Seng Store sells a wide range of basic necessities from toiletries, detergents and washing powder to canned food, instant cup noodles, packet drinks and bags of rice. The goods are stacked neatly on the wooden shelves and cupboards that are virtually unchanged in the past few decades, except for some repairs due to wear and tear.

Little vintage gems can also be found inside the provision shop, as though they have been frozen in time. Old black power switches and sockets are attached to the wooden beams, same as those that were once commonly found in households many decades ago. A wooden weight, in the shape of a beer bottle, was once used to balance a Milo tin can that functioned as a “cashier box”. And not forgetting a pair of vintage metal trays printed with Coca Cola and F&N advertisements that Mr Ang displays proudly in his shop.

Although provision shops are usually opened and owned by ethnic Singaporean Chinese, the Muslim and Indian provision shops have been fairly common in the past too. In the sixties and seventies when there were still many kampongs, provision shops became a vital amenity that provided much needed convenience to the villagers. To be able to open a provision shop with sufficient supply of goods required certain amount of capital. Therefore, the towkays of provision shops back then were viewed as doing considerably well.

Some provision shops in the past also sold petrol and diesel. One example was Yong Seng, situated along Changi Road, that had pumps supplying Esso diesel to motorists. Such scenarios are no more today, as the oligopoly of the four oil giants rules the local retail petrol market in Singapore today, with each of them owning 30 or more petrol stations each. Provision shops were not restricted to mainland Singapore; outlying islands such as Pulau Ubin and Pulau Tekong also had provision shops to provide the daily necessities to the residents living on the island.

Unlike supermarkets or convenience stores, provision shop owners built up good relationships with their customers, often by giving credits, a practice that some traditional provision shops still observe today, or home delivery services. There were other traditions too, one of which was the distribution of customary soft drinks to customers during Chinese New Years. In the late sixties and early seventies, each provision shop gave out some 700 cases of soft drinks every year. This tradition, however, stopped in 1973 when many provision shops were hit by the rising costs and overheads.

Traditional provision shops in Singapore had been facing challenges since the early eighties. Even the petrol service stations started offering groceries at discounted prices. With the mushrooming of competitors, more than 100 provision shops decided to remodel themselves in a bid to survive. They were renovated and converted into self-service mini-markets (mini-marts) with uniform logos, identical shop layouts and similar prices. Centralised bulk purchases, advertising and promotion campaigns were carried out to give the new shops the edge over others. By 1982, more than 50 provision shops had successfully converted to mini-marts.

Many decades have since gone by. Some had changed their business model. Others had opened and shut down. Those that have remained today are likely to struggle. Will the traditional provision shops officially walk into history one day? Or will they be able to stand the test of time? Perhaps next time when you walk past a traditional provision shop, show your support by buying some canned drinks or chocolate bars from them.

Published: 26 May 2015

There are many Malay-named roads or places in Singapore that are named after the island’s natural landscapes, such as bukit (“hill” in Malay), sungei, (“river”) or tanjong (“cape”). But there are not many with the name kuala, which refers to “estuary” in Malay. The definition of an estuary is “the tidal mouth of a large river, where the tide meets the stream”. One of the best known names is, of course, Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia.

There was, however, one road in Singapore that possessed the name kuala. It was the Kuala Loyang Road, formerly linked to Tampines Road and Upper Changi Road, and was extended to mouth of Sungei Loyang on its other end, where “the tide met the stream”. In the maps of the 1950s, the regions labelled Tampines and Changi are the Pasir Ris New Town and Loyang Industrial Estate today. The network of roads on the eastern side of Kuala Loyang Road, already well-developed six decades back, has become the restricted premises of Selarang Camp and Changi Air Base.

Kuala Loyang Road was extended in the late sixties; the original road was stretched all the way to the coastline and was linked to a jetty located between Sungei Loyang and Sungei Selarang. At its midway, a new road, also called Kuala Loyang Road, was branched off to link to Calshot Road.

The seventies saw a series of changes made to the vicinity around Kuala Loyang Road. Private estates known as Bukit Loyang Estate North and South were planned along Tampines Road in the early seventies. In 1978, drainage projects were carried out to convert Sungei Selarang into a canal, while the parcel of land between the river and Kuala Loyang Road was designated as a future industrial estate.

By 1981, a long straight main road had been constructed, cutting through both Tampines Road and Kuala Loyang Road, resulting in an interesting scenario where two Kuala Loyang Roads existed, one kilometre away from each other. As the housing and industrial estates developed in the vicinity, the long main road would go on to become an important road in the northeastern side of Singapore. It was named Loyang Avenue.

Kampong (Sungei) Loyang and Yan Kit Village were the larger villages in the vicinity. The former was located near to the mouth of Sungei Loyang, and had existed until the late eighties before it was torn down. At its former site now stands Aloha Loyang Resort and the row of condominiums at Jalan Loyang Besar. Yan Kit Village, previously situated at the southern end of Kuala Loyang Road, was also demolished in the late eighties.

Near the junction of Kuala Loyang Road and Tampines Road used to exist a Tanah Merah Besar Malay School. It was also where the former Ministry of Culture organised free movies in the sixties for the residents living in the villages nearby.

A clinic was set up beside the school in the seventies, but by the early nineties, the school premises was converted into a camp site (later renamed as an adventure centre) for the Ministry of Education (MOE) after the school ceased its operation.

As for Kuala Loyang Road, it was reduced to a short secondary road as an access to the MOE adventure centre by the mid-nineties. The road was expunged after the premises closed down in mid-2000s. Its street signage had been removed, and it was no longer listed in the official maps.

Published: 14 June 2015

Mention Pasir Panjang, and the impression that comes to mind is that it is now a busy strip of land occupied by the Port of Singapore Authority (PSA) Container Terminals, Pasir Panjang Wholesale Centre and the rows of warehouses, offices and industrial buildings.

However, before development, Pasir Panjang was largely a place made up of kampongs and rural school. In fact, there were four schools existed at this southern part of Singapore that provided necessary primary and secondary educations to the students living at Kampong Batu Berlayar, Kampong Sultan, Buona Vista Village, Kampong Jagoh and Heap Guan Village. The schools were mostly built in the fifties, and lasted until the eighties and nineties when the declining student enrollment led to their eventual closure.

Batu Berlayar School (1950s-1982)/Former NTUC Comfort Pasir Panjang Centre

Along Pasir Panjang Road currently stands an old vacant building that previously housed the former Batu Berlayar School and, later, the National Trades Union Congress (NTUC) Comfort Pasir Panjang Centre. Its name literally means “sailing rock” in Malay, a reference to the Dragon Teeth’s Gate (“Long Ya Men” 龙牙门) that stood at Keppel passageway and were used as navigation aids for boats that visited Singapore before the 19th century. In 1848, the rocks were demolished with explosives by the British to widen the water passageway allowing the larger vessels to pass through.

Batu Berlayar School was opened until 1982, when it was shut down due to low student enrollment. It was left empty for a few years before taken over by NTUC Comfort as a training centre for its taxi drivers. It was officially opened as its new Pasir Panjang branch in July 1987 by the former Second Deputy Prime Minister of Singapore Ong Teng Cheong.

Other events were regularly organised at the building compound for the benefits of its NTUC Comfort members. In 1987, a week-long Taxi Audio Equipment Fair was held at the centre, with a wide range of cassette-radios for the taxi drivers to choose and install in their vehicles. Auctions and sales of scrapped taxis, in the models of Toyota and Datsun, were also opened to interested parties.

After the NTUC Comfort Pasir Panjang Centre was shut down, the building was leased in the late nineties and early 2000s to Montessori Centre, a private school that offered Montessori education to young children. It was eventually returned to the Singapore Land Authority (SLA) and has been left vacant till today.

The Centre of Animal Welfare and Control, owned by the Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority of Singapore’s (AVA), currently stands a lane away from the former NTUC Comfort Pasir Panjang Centre. It was previously the Pasir Panjang Polyclinic, before the premises was leased to AVA in 1995. Its location was also the former site of the famous salt-water Haw Par Swimming Pool between the 1930s and the late fifties.

With its 20-year lease ending at end-2015, the animal welfare centre is expected to be relocated to Sungei Tengah.

Pasir Panjang Primary School (1930s-1986)

Situated between Jalan Mat Jambol and Yew Siang Road, off Pasir Panjang Road 5th Milestone, the former Pasir Panjang Primary School was one of the earliest schools established at Pasir Panjang. It started as Pasir Panjang English School, a co-education experiment proposed by the British government to have a mixture of boys and girls studying in the same elementary school. The co-education, also implemented among the Chinese, Malay and Indian students at Serangoon English School and Bukit Panjang English School in 1936, was considerably successful. As reported by the newspapers, the co-education:

“does not make boys effeminate, but gives them a sense of duty and polish, and makes the girls happier by removing an element of pettiness often evident in a class composed entirely of girls.“

During the imminent Japanese invasion in 1941, the records of Outram School, under the orders of the Education Department, were transferred to Pasir Panjang English School for safe keeping. Unfortunately, the school was hit by the bombings during the invasion, resulting in the total destruction of all the records of Outram School between 1906 and 1941.

In the fifties and sixties, Pasir Panjang Primary School produced many outstanding students. The most prominent ones were Goh Chok Tong, the second Prime Minister of Singapore (1990-2004), Dr Tan Eng Liang, the Senior Minister of State for National Development (1975-1978), and Dr Cham Tao Soon, the founding President of Nanyang Technological Institute (NTI) (1981-1990) and President of Nanyang Technological University (NTU) (1991-2002).

Other prominent figures include Tan Hwee Hock, the primary school teacher of Goh Chok Tong in the fifties and former member of the Gold Medal winning water polo team in the 1954 Asian Games, and Edwin Nadason Thumboo, the unofficial poet laureate of Singapore.

In the fifties, the teachers would regularly provide swimming lessons for the Pasir Panjang Primary School students at the Haw Par Swimming Pool, located on the opposite of Pasir Panjang Road. When Pasir Panjang Primary School was shut down in 1986, all of its remaining students were transferred to Jagoh Primary School. The premises was later used as a drug rehabilitation centre named Breakthrough Missions.

Pasir Panjang Secondary School (1955-1996)

Another former school in this vicinity was Pasir Panjang Secondary School, one of the few secondary schools that were built at this southern part of Singapore. Pasir Panjang Secondary School was established in 1955, first sharing the premises with Alexandra Estate Secondary School until it moved to its new building at Pasir Panjang in 1958. The secondary school, mostly made up of Malay students living at the nearby villages, had functioned for almost 40 years at Pasir Panjang until its closure in 1996.

An interesting trivia of Pasir Panjang Secondary School was the design of its school crest that consisted of a lion and three fish. The lion symbolised Singapore, while the three fish represented duyong, which means “mermaid” in Malay but is actually a marine mammal named dugong that could previously be found at the waters off Pasir Panjang. Portrayed as courageous and determined animals that were not afraid of the fiercest storms, the duyongs were inspirational symbols for the students studying at Pasir Panjang Secondary School. They were also mentioned in the school’s anthem:

“As the duyong rides up storm, so shall we face
The future with zest and steadfast enterprise.“

and was used as the name of the school’s scout group in the sixties.

In 1987, Pasir Panjang Secondary School’s student enrollment fell to only 575, way below the average of 1,200 in other secondary schools. The continuous declining number in the enrollment led to its eventual closure in 1996. After its closure, the school premises was left empty for several years before being converted into a Ministry of Education (MOE) Adventure Centre.

Labrador Primary School (1961-1989)

The former Labrador Primary School, standing next to the NTUC Comfort Pasir Panjang Centre, existed between 1961 and 1989. Like the Pasir Panjang Secondary School, the primary school was enrolled by many Malay students living nearby, although it did provide four main streams in English, Malay, Chinese and Tamil. Built at a cost of $350,000, the four-storey building with 24 classrooms was officially opened on 28 October 1961.

By the late eighties, the number of students at Labrador Primary School had dropped to only 172, and the government decided to close it in January 1989. Like the Pasir Panjang Primary School students, the last batches of the Labrador Primary School students were transferred to Jagoh Primary School.

The premises of the former Labrador Primary School was not left empty for long. Six months after its closure in January 1989, it was re-opened to serve as a temporary campus for the Singapore Polytechnic’s Business Administration faculty, which required additional space due to a large jump in the number of course applicants. Shuttle bus services were specially catered to ferry the students from the main campus at Dover Road to Pasir Panjang.

Today, the former Labrador Primary School building is leased to the Philippines Bayanihan Society.

Published: 21 June 2015

It looks like a tree, yet it looks a little odd in its appearance and shape.

If you have seen this kind of artificial trees at Old Choa Chu Kang Road or other parts of Singapore, usually at the western side, and you wonder about the oddness of it, you are not wrong in your observation. It is known as a cell phone tree, which are commonly used in the United States.

Designed to be inconspicuous and “blend” into its surroundings, the cell phone trees are usually shaped like pine or palm trees, probably due to their simpler shapes as compared to other types of trees. Local tropical trees with large crowns such as Rain Tree, Angsana or the Yellow Flame are not suitable for the designs of cell phone trees due to the wind loading effect and the high manufacturing cost of the plastic and fiberglass branches and leaves.

In Singapore, cell phone trees are not common, and are usually used by the military and the telecommunication companies to disguise their antenna towers.

Published: 28 June 2015

Passersby at the Tanjong Pagar vicinity would have noticed an abandoned church at the junction of Neil Road and Everton Road. It was formerly used as the premises of St Matthew’s Church, and had a long history back to the 19th century. The original church building was first established as a place of worship for the British sailors who arrived at Singapore in the 1890s. Prison wardens from the nearby Outram Prison also used the church for their prayers. The premises, however, fell into disrepair by the 1920s, and was left vacant for years.

In September 1929, the Anglican Diocese of Singapore took over the vacated building as a place of worship for its Cantonese Congregation, which were inaugurated in September 1902 and had to share with the Hokkien, Foochow, Malay and Tamil-speaking congregations at St Peter’s Church at Stamford Road. The new church was named St Matthew’s Church, and was fondly known as Sing Mah Tai in Cantonese. During the Japanese Occupation, the church continued to operate, although much of its activities were halted.

While the Anglican Diocese of Singapore was established in 1909, the Anglican establishment in Singapore started much earlier. It officially began in 1826 with the appointment of Reverend Robert Burns as the Resident Chaplain. A decade later, the first Anglican Church was built. The building was, however, closed in 1852 after it was struck twice by lightnings. After its demolition, another church was constructed at the original site. The new church, named St Andrew’s Cathedral, was funded by Scottish merchants, designed by Lieutenant-Colonel Ronald MacPherson (1817-1869) and built by Indian convict labourers.

After the war, St Matthew’s Church carried out plans to repair its aging building and at the same time, expand its premises, including the construction of a vicarage. A kindergarten was also built in the early fifties for the young children living in the nearby Chinatown. The new kindergarten was designed in simple Art Deco-style; it had a sloping roof laid with terracotta Marseilles tiles and timber windows with louvers. Named St Matthew’s Church Kindergarten, it was well-equipped with a Memorial Hall, classrooms and offices. By the sixties and seventies, it would become one of the largest and most famous kindergartens in Singapore, having nourished many generations of young children.

In the late fifties, St Matthew’s also embarked on a re-building plan of its main church building. Designed with a distinctive Modern style, the new double-storey building consisted of a prayer hall on top of a large function room. It also possessed an unique vertically protruding roof that looked like a ship’s prow, and a tall concrete bell tower that was erected beside the main chapel. In 1963, the new church building was completed and dedicated by Rt. Rev C.K. Sausbury, the former Bishop of Singapore.

In 1996, the land where the church was standing on was gazetted for compulsory acquisition by the government. It was planned to be used for the construction of a new Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) station of the Northeast (NE) Line. Affected by the redevelopment plans, St Matthew’s Church Kindergarten was shut down, and St Matthew’s Church began looking for alternate sites to be relocated. The church secured a plot of land at Tiong Bahru’s Eng Hoon Street in 2000, and moved to its new premises five years later.

The old premises of St Matthew’s Church at Neil Road was then returned to the authority. The new MRT station, however, was not built at its site; the Outram MRT Station of the NE Line, located 150m away, was opened in 2003. The church was left abandoned and faced the possibility of demolition. Fortunately, it was gazetted as a conserved building on 6 June 2014, after almost a decade of abandonment.

With the conservation status, it will continue to be an important landmark at Neil Road, together with the neighbouring former building of Fairfield Methodist Girls’ School (operated at Neil Road between 1912 and 1983), which is conserved in October 2000 and has been integrated with the Police Cantonment Complex.

Published: 11 July 2015

The “50 Made in Singapore Products” Exhibition is currently held at the National Museum of Singapore till September 2015. In celebrating Singapore’s 50th birthday, the commemorative exhibition features Singapore’s manufacturing achievements and showcases many popular locally-made past and present products such as the Setron televisions, Bata shoes and Tiger beer.

The 50 products are categorised into six major groups: Electronics, Fashion, Food & Beverages, Medicine, Household and Transport.

Electronics

1. Setron Televisions

Led by Steven Tan Sek Toh, a group of enterprising local businessmen formed Setron in 1964, and produced the first ever Singapore-made television set in May 1965 at its temporary factory in Leng Kee Road. In April 1966, Setron moved to its new factory at Tanglin Halt Close. At its new factory, Setron produced almost 1,000 television sets a month.

By 1971, Setron developed into the largest television manufacturer in Southeast Asia. The major shareholding of the company was acquired by Haw Par Brothers International in 1979, but Setron continued its manufacturing of television sets until the late eighties, when it shifted its production base to Johor Bahru.

2. Roxy Electric Industries Televisions

In 1966, a Hong Kong industrialist named Li Dak Sum set up a factory at Tanglin Halt Road, after obtaining the license from Hayakawa Electric Co Ltd to assemble Sharp television sets. Besides the assembly works, his Tanglin Halt factory would also manufacture the wooden cabinets for the television sets.

By 1968, high demands led to Li Dak Sum’s business and he built a new nine-storey building beside his factory. In the seventies, he also acquired the rights to assemble Telefunken, a German-brand television set, in Singapore. In the eighties, the government removed a tariff protection for locally-made television, and this led to a down turn in Li Dak Sum’s business. In 1984, he scaled down the manufacturing arm of Roxy Electric Industries, and eventually sold off his stake in the company.

3. Pan-Electric Refrigerators

Pan-Electric Industries Ltd was established in 1963. In 1965, its factory at Kampong Arang Road produced many affordable and high quality electrical appliances for the local market, such as refrigerators, air-conditioners and electric cookers. By 1970, Pan-Electric’s products were exported to more than 16 countries including Australia and Hong Kong.

In 1981, Pan-Electric sold its electrical appliances subsidiary to ACMA Electric Industries, which continued to manufacture refrigerators until 1990. The main business of Pan-Electric Industries was diversified to other sectors such as marine salvage, real estate and hotels.

In 1986, Pan-Electric Industries collapsed due to a huge debt of $480 million. The event, known as Pan-El Crisis, caused a shock in the Singapore Stock Exchange, which was forced to shut down for the first and only time in its history. Pan-Electric Industries eventually went into receivership and closed down.

4. ACMA Refrigerators

ACMA Electrical Industries Ltd was established in 1965 as a joint venture between the Economic Development Board (EDB), Chung Hsin Electric, Machinery Manufacturing Corporation of Taiwan and several Singapore businessmen. It set up a factory at Jurong to mainly produce refrigerators and electric desk fans for Singapore, Malaysia and Brunei.

In 1990, the company sold off its loss-making refrigerator and air-conditioning businesses to OYL Industries Bhd in Malaysia, which was later acquired by Daikin Industries Ltd in 2006. This made the Japanese air-conditioning giant the world’s second largest manufacturer of air-conditioning systems.

5. Trek Thumbdrives

Trek 2000 International Ltd was founded by Henn Tan in 1995 when he bought a small electronics trading company called Trek. After working for several years with his team of engineers to make a device capable of storing and transferring data using the Universal Serial Bus (USB), Henn Tan’s Trek 2000 successfully launched the Thumbdrive at CeBIT in 2000.

In 2002, the Singapore’s Intellectual Property Office approved Trek 2000’s patents in the Thumbdrive and its associated USB mass storage technology. Today, Trek 2000 has developed into a global company with offices in the United States, Japan, India and China. Its major partners and clients include SanDisk, Toshiba and Imation.

6. Rollei Cameras

Founded in Germany in 1920, Rollei set up its first Singapore production plant at Alexandra Road in 1971, before subsequently relocated to Chai Chee Road. While retaining its research and development (R&D) work in Germany, Rollei pumped in an estimated $149 million in the investment of its Singapore production base in the seventies.

Using imported components from Germany and Japan, the Rollei cameras were engraved with the words “Made in Singapore”. In 1981, however, the parent company of Rollei went into bankruptcy. The Singapore plant was closed down, resulting in the retrenchment of 4,000 workers. Rollei was sold to Samsung in 1995, and subsequently to Capitellum, a Danish investment company.

7. Philips Electronic Products

Established in 1951, Philips Singapore Pte Ltd started as a trading company importing mainly lighting products and also acting as the local distributor of radios and gramophones. Its business expanded in the sixties, and the company decided to manufacture its own products. Between 1968 and 1970, Philips set up assembly factories at Boon Keng Road and the Jurong Industrial Estate to produce television sets, radios and other small domestic appliances.

As the demand of its products continued to surge, Philips decided to consolidate its operations and built a new plant in its newly acquired 18,500-square metres site at Toa Payoh in 1972. Today, the company has expanded beyond manufacturing. It is now vested in the design of electrical and lighting systems for buildings and facilities, as well as the health technology industry.

8. Sound Blasters

Sim Wong Hoo and his schoolmate Ng Kai Wa founded Creative Technology in July 1981 with an initial capital of $8,000, which started as a computer repair shop at Pearl’s Centre. During this period, Sim Wong Hoo developed an add-on memory board for the Apple II computers, and also customised computers with incorporated enhanced audio capabilities. These eventually led to the invention of a standalone sound card named Sound Blaster, which was one of the earliest dedicated audio processing cards available to the public.

The original Sound Blaster was introduced in November 1989 at the Computer Dealers’ Exhibition in Las Vegas. The Sound Blaster became the PC audio standard when it was incorporated into the Microsoft Windows OS Multimedia in 1991. Today, Creative Technology has diversified its business to speakers, headphones, MP3 players and Chinese language software.

9. Smith Corona Typewriters

In 1973, the American company Smith Corona Marchant Corporation invested $11 million to build a manufacturing plant at Bedok, which produced electric portable typewriters using ribbon spools and film cartridges. By 1979, over 90% of the typewriters were exported to the United States, Canada and the Western European countries.

In 1989, Smith Corona opened a new factory at Ayer Rajah Industrial Estate which focused on the assembly of typewriters. Rising costs and waning demands for typewriters, however, led to the closure of Smith Corona’s two Singapore factories in 1995. Its production base was subsequently relocated to Mexico.

10. Robertson Amplifiers

Robertson Audio was founded by David Tan How Khim in 1979, as a subsidiary of Hwee Seng & Co which dealt with the import and distribution of equipment from Japan and the United States. In the early eighties, David Tan decided to design and build his amplifiers and named them after his father, the founder of Hwee Seng & Co.

In 1982, David Tan launched his FortyTen amplifier in the United States for US$895. Two years later, he released the high-end SixtyTen power amplifier to the US market for US$2,550. The power amplifier won an award at the Singapore Design Award in 1989 for its “dynamic balance between the high and low sounds” and its ability to reduce acoustic interferences.

Despite the great reviews, the high overseas distribution costs made production unsustainable and reduced profit margins. The last set of Robertson amplifiers was produced in 2008, after which David Tan took over Hwee Seng Electronics and concentrated in the distribution of global high-quality audio equipment.

Fashion

11. Bata Shoes

Bata was founded by a Czech industrialist named Thomas Bata. When it established its first store in Singapore in 1931, it was already Europe’s largest shoe manufacturer. In 1964, a Bata factory was set up at Telok Blangah. It was opened by then Finance Minister Dr Goh Keng Swee, who admitted that he was a long-standing customer of the company’s value-for-money shoes.

Besides adult footwear, Bata was extremely successful in the promotion of their school shoes in the seventies and eighties. Its tagline of “First to Bata, then to school” was catchy, and its Bata Badminton Master shoes were very popular among the students of that era.

By 1983, due to cost considerations, Bata ceased the manufacturing of its fashion shoes and sandals, and switched to the production of safety shoes and army boots. Even though it has ceased its local shoe manufacturing, Bata still maintains a strong retail presence in Singapore.

12. Bibi&Baba Apparel

Bibi&Baba started as a small shop at Orchard Road specialising with children wear. It was established in 1947 by Nina Whuang, and was one of the first local shops to offer party apparel to children. After it had created the uniforms for the Singapore American School in the sixties, the company expanded into the production of uniforms, as well as apparel for youths and working adults.

In 1970, it started to produce jeans and sportswear. The local garment industry flourished in the seventies and eighties; Bibi&Baba became the contract manufacturer for major foreign brands such as Macy’s (US), Marks & Spencer’s (UK) and Gaps (US). From the nineties onwards, Bibi&Baba focused on the design and production of uniforms for corporate clients and institutions, and became the leading manufacturer of uniforms in Singapore.

13. Kwanpen Handbags

An immigrant from China, Kwan Pen Seng worked in 1938 as a repairman of leather handbags owned by the wives of British servicemen based in Singapore. He later decided to venture into the production of crocodile leather handbags and belts. Soon, he became famous for his skillful craftsmanship of crocodile leather handbags.

Kwan Pen Seng’s business grew and by the mid-seventies, he was producing crocodile leather bags for retailers and Western brands. The Raffles Handbag was the most iconic of Kwanpen’s collection of handbags. Today, the company’s biggest market is Hong Kong, and it has numerous outlets in Singapore, Macau, Kuala Lumpur, Istanbul, Doha, Bangkok and South Korea.

14. Perfumes of Singapore

Originally known as Perfumes of the Orient, Perfumes of Singapore was established by local socialite Christina Lee and her husband in 1969, after being inspired by a 500-year-old Ming dynasty scent container in a museum and a visit to leading perfume houses in Europe.

The company had two factories in Jurong and Malaysia’s Petaling Jaya, producing scents named Chinta, May Ling, Bali, Javanesque for women and Sultan and Tai Pan for men. Later, they produced Singapore Girl, a best-selling hit with the locals and tourists, winning the Singapore Manufacturers Association’s top prize for best design and packaging at the 1977 Singapore Fair.

Perfumes of Singapore was eventually closed down in the nineties.

15. Heng Long Crocodile Skins

Heng Long Leather Company was established by Koh Long Cheok in 1947. It started as Chye Huat Tannery, supplying tanned skins to shops that sold watchstraps, belts and souvenirs to the British forces in Singapore. In 1979, the business became a private limited company called Heng Long Leather Co Pte Ltd (HLL).

When fashion and luxury brands were in demand during the eighties, HLL switched its focus from trading of crocodilian and exotic skins with other tanneries to offering value-added tanning activities. By 1991, HLL was processing almost 4,000 crocodile skins a month.

In 1998, HLL became the world’s first reptile skin tannery to obtain ISO 9002 certification. It went public listed in 2008, and three years later, it was acquired by Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy (LVMH), one of the world’s top fashion conglomerates.

16. Three Rifles Shirts

Three Rifles Shirt Manufacturer was founded by Chong Chong Choong and his wife Lim Lai Choon in 1965, who used popular Taiwanese singers to promote his wide variety of shirts in different styles. In 1980, Three Rifles acquired the rights to market Italian Caserini label in Asia.

Three Rifles built a $7.4-million factory at Paya Lebar Road in 1992. By then, the company had its shirts exported to Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Spain, India and Pakistan. Its turnover had grown to $21 million a year. In 1995, Three Rifles paid a record $11.9 million for a 1,351 square metre site at MacPherson for its new factory.

In the 2000s, Three Rifles went into a decline and was making huge losses. It was acquired by TR Networks in 2005. Today, it still actively markets the Caserini label, especially in Malaysia.

17. RISIS Orchids

The RISIS Orchid was the product of a biochemist who researched on orchids. Its origins could be traced back to 1975 when Dr Goh Keng Swee, then Finance Minister, asked the Singapore Institute of Standards and Industrial Research (SISIR) to develop unique Singapore souvenirs. A year later, the Chairman of SISIR Dr Lee successfully created the gold-plated RISIS Orchid, which soon became a big hit with both the locals and tourists.

In 1981, the SISIR collaborated with local craftsman Mow Chee Kong to design a series of casted orchids based on the Vanda Miss Joaquim, Singapore’s national flower. The first RISIS counter was then opened in C.K. Tangs at Orchard Road in 1985. Six years later, the first RISIS gift gallery made its debut at the Singapore Botanic Gardens. With the increasing demand, RISIS moved its factory at Henderson to Loyang to increase its production capacity.

In 2000, RISIS was bought over by B.P. de Silva Holdings.

18. Crocodile Apparel

The Crocodile International Pte Ltd had its origins traced back to 1938 when the family of its founder, Dato Dr Tan Hian Tsin, set up a garment business at Saigon. After the war, Dr Tan Hian Tsin migrated to Singapore and established Li Sheng Min Co Ltd at North Bridge Road. The company produced singlets and was named “Crocodile” due to its recognisability and rarity.

In 1951, Dr Tan Hian Tsin registered his “Crocodile” trademark, which by then had penetrated the markets in Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia and Thailand. The company expanded into Hong Kong in 1953, where Dr Tan Hian Tsin started United Shirts Factory to manufacture Crocodile shirts.

In the late sixties, Crocodile International got into a series of lawsuits with Lacoste over the usage of the crocodile logo in Asian markets. In 2010, it was the official apparel sponsor for the first Youth Olympic Games held in Singapore.

19. Swan Socks

In 1963, Swan Socks Manufacturing Co was established under the Pioneer Industries Scheme promoted by the Economic Development Board (EDB). It was a collaboration effort between three Japanese companies and the local Siakson Trading Co. With a paid up capital of $1 million, Swan Socks was Singapore’s first mass-market socks manufacturer and was expected to produce 3.5 million dozen pairs of socks every year.

In 1964, its factory at Jalan Tukang, Jurong, was opened. Two years later, Singapore became self-sufficient in nylon socks, with Swan Socks and Chenta Rayon Co Ltd producing 320,000 pairs of socks and stockings monthly. With the textile prices taken a big hit in 1974 due to the oil crisis, Swan Socks were able to avoid its downturn by manufacturing socks for the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF).

In 1983, Swan Socks became a wholly Singaporean-owned company, and by 1988, it had expanded into the manufacture of better-designed fashion socks. However, it soon ceased its operation after being outcompeted by its competitors’ cheaper products.

Food & Beverages

20. Van Houten Chocolates

Van Houten Chocolate was founded by Coenraad Johannes Van Houten in 1828 when he invented a process to manufacture tastier and more soluble cocoa powder. In 1966, Van Houten Company collaborated with the local Sheng Huo Enterprise Ltd to establish a factory at Tanglin Halt. Within a year, the factory was producing 50 tons of industrial cocoa to Thailand.

Sheng Huo Enterprise was renamed Allied Chocolate Industries Ltd in 1970 and was subsequently listed on the Singapore Stock Exchange. It went on to become one of the world’s largest suppliers of cocoa and chocolates. In 2000, Van Houten was acquired by Barry Callebaut Group, a French-Belgian chocolate conglomerate.

21. Khong Guan Biscuits

Khong Guan Biscuit Company was established by Chew Choo Keng at Howard Road in 1947. Chew Choo Keng first arrived at Singapore and worked for Tan Kah Kee in his Khiam Aik Biscuit Factory. In 1940, he relocated to Malaysia to start his own business, named Khong Leng Biscuit Factory in Ipoh. Beside biscuit production, Chew Choo Keng’s business also manufactured soap, coconut oil, rubber products and charcoals.

After the Second World War, Chew Choo Keng moved back to Singapore to set up Khong Guan with the help of his brother Choon Han. By 1959, Khong Guan was producing 10,000 tins of biscuits everyday. Chew Choo Keng’s factories at Malaysia produced even more, at 40,000 biscuits daily. Khong Guan’s products were mostly exported to neighbouring countries, as well as countries as far as Middle East and Africa.

Khong Guan expanded in the early seventies, and was producing 75 tons of associated biscuits and confectioneries daily. By the early eighties, Khong Guan was able to distribute its biscuit products for the United States and Japan. In 1993, the Chew family sold their controlling share of Khong Guan Holdings in Malaysia to Malaysian businessman Lim Geok Chan, and thus ended the company’s ties with its original founders.

22. Lam Soon Cooking Oil

Ng Keng Soon established Lam Soon Singapore in 1929 to trade copra and canned food. In 1950, the family business was incorporated as Lam Soon Cannery Pte Ltd, with a new manufacturing plant built at Jalan Jurong Kechil two years later. In the fifties, Lam Soon was the most modern plant that manufactured cooking oil, margarine, soap and other cleaning products.

Popular household brand Knife cooking oil was first introduced in Singapore in 1948. With the introduction of fractionation in 1970, Lam Soon was able to manufacture cooking oil from palm oil. Recognising the palm oil’s potential, Lam Soon invested in many plantations in East and Peninsula Malaysia, and South Thailand.

In 1992, Lam Soon relocated its productions to Malaysia, and the office at Singapore focused on marketing and distribution. Knife brand cooking oil remains a household staple and in 2005, it was recognised as a “Heritage Brand” at the Singapore Prestige Brand Awards.

23. Woh Hup Dried Noodles and Oyster Sauce

Chou Yeng Lan left China for Singapore in the early 1920s and established the Woh Hup Noodle Shop at North Bridge Road. As his business thrived, Chou Yeng Lan received requests from his customers if they could take home dried noodles in packed forms. After learning the process in Hong Kong, Chou Yeng Lan returned and started manufacturing dried noodles using a charcoal kiln. The dried noodles soon became hugely popular, and Chou Yeng Lan set up a factory at Everton Road.

Another Chou Yeng Lan’s popular products were his sauces. Back then, most noodle sellers and cooks would use sauces imported from Hong Kong. Chou Yeng Lan brought in sauce-making and food preservation experts and started blending his own style of sauce, and it proved highly popular with the restaurants in Singapore.

In 1971, the family business was incorporated as Woh Hup Noodle House (Pte) Ltd, and its first sauce factory was established in Jalan Senang. Chou Yeng Lan decided to focus on sauce-making, and by the eighties, Woh Hup was the largest oyster sauce manufacturer in Singapore. In 1995, Woh Hup Food Industries Pte Ltd was acquired by good giant Cerebos.

24. Tiger Brand Soya Sauce

Chuen Cheong Food Industries’ founder was Chia Hou, who arrived at Singapore from China in the 1930s and established a shop named Chop Chuen Cheong at Smith Street. Later, he also set up a manufacturing plant at Geylang Road Lorong 17. The plant was relocated twice during the seventies, first to Lorong Ayam Beroga in 1971, and then to Defu Lane in 1980.

Cheun Cheong Food Industries was perhaps most famous for its various grades of light soya sauce and dark soya sauce. Using fermented soya beans and roasted mixed grains, Cheun Cheong was able to produce its soya sauces in the traditional Chinese methods. The company later established the Tiger brand, which consists of soya, tomato and chilli sauces, as well as vinegar.

25. Star Brand Jaggery Sugar

In 1947, Cheng Keng Kang founded his company named Cheong Yew Heng Candy Factory Pte Ltd, which started as a small firm with only five staff and was housed in a shophouse at Upper Serangoon Road, selling canned preserved fruits and Chinese candies such as dried plums and hawthorn.

During the fifties, Cheong Yew Heng Candy Factory switched to the manufacturing of traditional sugar products such as rock sugar, black sugar, red and black jaggery sugar. The company moved to Chin Bee Drive in Jurong in the eighties, and with the larger premises, it was able to increase its storage and production capacity.

One of its products, the Star Brand Red Jaggery Sugar, is unique to Singapore as it is found only locally and is commonly used in the local Indian dish Putu Mayam.

26. Yeo Hiap Seng Drinks

Yeo Hiap Seng (YHS) was founded by Yeo Keng Lian in 1900 as a purveyor of quality soya sauces. He set up his first factory in Singapore in 1938, and followed with a second one at Bukit Timah in 1951. In 1953, the company became the first in Southeast Asia to produce bottled soya bean drinks.

The chrysanthemum tea was Yeo Hiap Seng’s another popular drink, contributing to the company’s success as a household name. In the sixties, Yeo Hiap Seng was the first company in the world to use the Ultra High Temperature (UHT) process to package their beverages, making their packet drinks light and compact.

27. Boncafé Coffee

Inspired by an expatriate wife who commented that it was difficult to find a decent cup of coffee in Singapore, Werner Ernst Huber established Boncafé Pte Ltd in 1962. Started as a subsidiary of Anglo-Swiss Trading Co Ltd, Boncafé Pte Ltd specialised in roasting 100% pure gourmet coffee beans using a battery-operated coffee roaster.

Boncafé’s first factory was set up in Jurong in 1962. Its first products included Boncafé Swiss Blend and Extra Blend Ground Coffee Retail Pack, which were roasted using the best beans from around the world. From 1972 to 2003, Boncafé Pte Ltd opened offices in countries such as Malaysia, Hong Kong, Australia, Cambodia, China and Dubai. It was rebranded as Boncafé International Pte Ltd in 1989.

28. Tiger Beer

The Malayan Breweries, now known as Asia Pacific Breweries (APB), first launched and marketed Tiger Beer as its flagship brand in 1932. The name was inspired by the vigour and vitality of the tiger, and the coconut palm tree in the logo signified its tropical origins.

Using a modified fermentation process, Tiger Beer was successfully brewed in Singapore, even though the brewing of lager beer typically required cool temperatures. The fermentation process was known as “tropical lagering”, in which vertical tanks with conical bottoms were used to create a brew rich in flavour. The signature taste of Tiger Beer was its balance of medium bitter beer and sweet malt.

29. Amoy Canning Canned Products

Amoy Canning was originally founded in Amoy (Xiamen) of China in 1908 by Ng Teng Guan. In 1949, a Singapore office was established at Cross Street, and three years later, a $1-million food and beverage factory was set up at Bukit Timah Road.

When the Amoy Canning factory first opened, it bottled non-carbonated Green Spot orangeade. It was only in 1954 that the company ventured into the manufacture of local food products such as curry, redang and sambal products. Its best known Singapore food products were perhaps the Curry Chicken canned food.

Amoy Canning also developed and produced combat rations for the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) between the late sixties and eighties.

30. National Aerated Water Company Bottled Drinks

The National Aerated Water Company was established in 1929 by Yap Shing Nin, Cheng Sze Boo and Tan Kah Woo. Its first factory was located at Hamilton Road and during the Japanese Occupation, it was kept in operation even though the sugar supplies were low.

After the Second World War, National Aerated Water Company acquired the rights to manufacture and distribute Sinalco, a soft drink originally from Germany. It was a huge hit, especially in Singapore and Malaysia. By 1954, the company was able to build a new factory at Serangoon Road, which cost $500,000 in construction and had a production capacity of almost 48,000 bottles of soft drinks daily.

Between the sixties and eighties, the company also manufactured several other popular brands of soft drinks such as Kickapoo, Singacol and Fanta. However, the company gradually went into decline and was shut down in the nineties, partly due to the stiff competitions from other soft drink manufacturers.

Medicine

31. Double Prawn Brand Herbal Oils

In the fifties, Chinese physician Yeoh Liew Kung developed a home-made herbal oil to treat common aliments such as minor wounds, bites and scabies. His herbal oil proved to be effective and popular, which led to Yeoh Liew Kung’s establishment of a company named Tai Tong Ah Company.

During its early days, Tai Tong Ah Company peddled its traditional Chinese medicinal products through itinerant salespersons and a van which would make stops at different villages. Such methods of sales and distribution were used by Yeoh Liew Kung until the seventies.

Tai Tong Ah Company opened its first factory at Genting Lane in 1979, and relocated to Pasir Panjang Industrial Estate in 1993. During this period, Tai Tong Ah Company focused on two main products; Herbal Oil and Rumagon Oil, used for relieving muscle aches and pains, which it continues to manufacture and distribute today.

32. Chop Wah On Medicated Oils

Tong Chee Leong, a merchant from Guangdong who arrived at Singapore in the early 20th century, founded Chop Wah On at Pagoda Street in 1916. The shop sold medicated oils such as Red Flower Oil, Kayu Puteh Oil and Citronella Oil, which were popular with the local Chinese community who would often give them as presents to their relatives from Hong Kong and China.

After Tong Chee Leong passed the business to his son Tong Seng Mun, Chop Wah On developed more new medicated oils, notably the Crocodile Oil for the treatment of skin-related aliments. In 1987, the Tong family leased a factory at Alexandra DistriPark to increase its production capabilities. It later moved to its own premises at Eunos TechPark in 2007.

33. Tiger Balm

Tiger Balm was developed and marketed as an ointment for aches and pains by the famous Aw brothers, Boon Haw and Boon Par, who were the sons of a Chinese herbalist called Aw Chu Kin. In 1862, Aw Chu Kin moved to Myanmar to establish a medicinal shop named Eng Aun Tong.

After the death of their father in 1908, the Aw brothers inherited Eng Aun Tong and developed the paste formula to perfection. Aw Boon Haw carried out extensive marketing of his products with success. By 1920, he was the richest man in Myanmar.

In 1923, Aw Boon Haw set up a Tiger Balm shop in Singapore, and three years later, built a factory at Jurong. The family business was agglomerated in 1969 in a holding company known as Haw Par Brothers International Limited, and in 1971, they awarded the franchise of Tiger Balm to Jack Chia Group for 20 years.

34. Three Legs Cooling Water

Using traditional Chinese herbs, the Wen Ken Group, founded in 1937 by Foo Yin, Foo Yew Ming, Chan Seng Koon and Chong Tang Seong, developed Three Legs Cooling Water, once used to treat common aliment such as headaches and ulcers.

Wen Ken Group set up its first office and factory at Choon Guan Street during the pre-war years. When the demand of their Three Legs products rose between the fifties and seventies, the group expanded overseas and established six factories in Malaysia. In the eighties, Wen Ken Group repackaged their Three Legs Cooling Water, replacing its glass bottles with plastic ones.

The rhinoceros artwork featured on the Three Legs Cooling Water caused some misunderstanding among the consumers in the nineties, when the public thought certain rhinoceros parts were used in the production of the cooling water. As a result, the Ministry of Health requested Wen Ken Group to remove the rhinoceros artwork from its products.

35. Axe Brand Universal Oils

In 1927, Leung Yun Chee arrived at Singapore from Shunde, China, and became an agent for a German pharmaceutical company. A German whom he met gave him the formula for medicated oil. Leung Yun Chee, in 1928, established Leung Kai Fook to manufacture the medicated oil commercially. Leung Yun Chee named his medicated oil Axe Brand, and would embark on a bold advertising campaign. Axe Brand Universal Oil soon became a household name in Singapore.

In the sixties, the Axe Brand had a major breakthrough. After Leung Heng Keng, son of Leung Yun Chee, realised that many Muslims suffered from seasickness after travelling on ships for their haj pilgrimages, he decided to give out Axe Brand Universal Oil as samples for the pilgrimages. It was a big success, as pilgrims from Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and India began buying boxes of medicated oil to bring back to their countries.

In 1976, the company started to distribute Axe Brand Universal Oil in Hong Kong, and entered the vast market of China when it opened up in the eighties.

Household

36. Micro Ball-point Pens

In 1978, Singapore became the first Southeast Asian country to manufacture ball-point pens. It was started by a Hong Kong company called Foo Wah Industries (S) Pte Ltd, which set up a $3-million factory at Jalan Pemimpin that was equipped with a European machine for making tips and refills.

Unfortunately, the company ran into trouble almost as soon as it started production, as the supply of ball-point pens far exceeded the demand. By 1979, Foo Wah Industries was on the verge of bankruptcy, and had to sell four floors of its six-storey building. In 1981, Foo Wah Industries’ business was able to rebound and it soon began to export 10 million ball-point pens to Britain, Spain, American and Hong Kong.

Foo Wah Industries later diversified its business to plastic container manufacturing. In 1982, it won a contract to manufacture plastic cups and toothpaste sets for the in-flight service of the Singapore Airlines.

37. Diethelm Furniture

In 1921, Diethelm & Company was founded by Wilhelm Heinrich Diethelm who had arrived at Singapore in 1871. The company mainly dealt with imported goods until 1928, when it acquired a Swiss firm and switched to manufacturing.

During the Second World War, Diethelm & Company suffered enormous losses in its manufacturing business. It decided to venture into furniture making in 1943. After the war, Diethelm & Company set up a furniture showroom at Market Street, and started manufacturing fittings for its furniture. It opened another showroom at Orchard Road in 1972.

Today, the company is known as D Furniture, and is specialised in office system furniture.

38. Eveready Batteries

The first Eveready dry battery was produced in Cleveland, United States, in 1890. In 1946, an American firm called National Carbon Company established a factory at Hillview Road to manufacture Eveready dry cell batteries. The factory, with its 10m-tall tower with a silver Eveready battery model at its apex, became the vicinity’s landmark. In 1957, the company’s Singapore branch was renamed Union Carbide Singapore Ltd.

In the eighties, cheaper Japanese batteries provided stiff competition to the Singapore manufactured batteries. As a result, the Union Carbide battery factory at Hillview was shut down in 1985. A year later, the company sold its battery division to Ralston Purina Company, which later became Energizer Singapore in April 2000.

39. Kiwi Shoe Polish

In 1906, an Australian named William Ramsay developed an effective boot polish that could conserve footwear buckskin, create a shine and reinstate lost colour to boots. He named his trademarked product Kiwi as a tribute to his wife who was a New Zealander.

In 1952, Kiwi International established its seventh overseas factory at Bukit Timah, which was later known as the Hillview Industrial Estate. The factory began production in 1954, including a wide range of Kiwi products from water-proof shoe polish to white polish and waxes.

By 1979, almost 80% of the Kiwi products were exported to Japan, Hong Kong, Burma and Taiwan. The brand was acquired by Sara Lee Corporation, an US conglomerate, in 1984. Kiwi’s Singapore factory closed down in 1992 and was relocated to Tebaru in Johor Bahru.

40. Blue Box Toys

In 1952, Hong Kong entrepreneur Peter Chan Pui founded Blue Box Toys. Its company soon became the leading toy manufacturer in Hong Kong, thanks to its best selling “drinks and wets” dolls. In May 1968, Blue Box Toys opened its first factory, also Singapore’s first toy factory, at the Kallang Industrial Estate.

In 1969, Blue Box Toys received an order to produce 40,000 toys to Holland and the Scandinavian countries for Christmas. One of its signature products produced in the sixties was the Knights in Armour figures set. Blue Box Toys’ Singapore factory was eventually closed down in 2003, but today, it still continues to produce toys in China, and is distributing them through Toys R Us, Target and Wal-Mart.

41. Nippon Paint

Goh Cheng Liang, owning a humble paint shop in 1955, was acting as the main distributor for Nippon Paint in Singapore. A decade later, Nippon Paint set up its first Singapore factory at the Tanglin Halt Industrial Estate, and quickly became one of the leading paint manufacturer in the country. The first product produced by the factory was Matex emulsion paint.

In 1974, the company introduced the Super Vinilex 5000, an affordable and quality interior paint that soon made Nippon Paint a household name. In 1976, the company opened its new facility at First Lok Yang Road, which continues to operate today.

Nippon Paint also launched another of their products in 1997, called the Express Kote Polymeric Plaster Protector which offered a fast-drying base coat for concrete building.

42. Singapore Glass Manufacturers Glass Containers

The Singapore Glass Manufacturers (SGM) Co Ltd, popularly known as the Singapore Glass Factory, was a pioneer in the manufacture of glass containers in Singapore and its factory at Henderson Road was an iconic landmark between the forties and seventies. It was established in 1948 as a subsidiary of Australian Consolidated Industries (ACI). During the sixties, most of its glass containers were produced in Singapore and Malaysia and were exported to Hong Kong, Fiji, Iran and South Africa.

In 1981, the company was relocated to Jurong Industrial Estate, but the intense competition and declining demand of glass containers in the eighties led to heavy losses suffered by SGM. The Singapore factory eventually closed down in 1985, and its operations were shifted to Petaling Jaya, Malaysia.

43. KING’s Safety Shoes

King’s Shoe Manufacturing was founded by Chan Kee Tong in 1965, which started as a small shop at Dakota Crescent with 20 staff. In the early seventies, the company focused on the manufacturing and distribution of industrial safety footwear under the KING’s brand, which proved to be popular in many industries such as oil and gas, ship repair, aviation engineering, mining and automotive industries.

King’s soon expanded its business to overseas and set up manufacturing plants in Malaysia, Indonesia, Europe and Australia through both direct and joint ventures. It also expanded its range of products to include non-footwear related personal protective equipment (PPE) such as safety goggles and helmets. In the 2000s, the company was renamed King’s Safetywear (KSW) Limited to reflect its progress from the manufacture and marketing of safety shoes to include other PPE items.

44. UIC Detergent

The UIC detergent, a household brand in Singapore, was one of the many cleaning products produced by the United Industrial Corporation (UIC) Pte Ltd, established in Singapore since 1964. Besides the laundry detergents, the company also specialised in dishwashing detergents.

In 1974, UIC’s detergent manufacturing division was transferred to its subsidiary called UIC Chemicals Pte Ltd. The company was later bought over by the SALIM Group and was renamed Universal Integrated Corporation Consumer Products (UICCP) which continued to produce household detergents and fabric care products in Singapore and Malaysia.

45. Royal Selangor Pewter Products

In the 1880s, three brothers – Yong Chin Seong, Yong Wai Seong and Yong Koon Seong – settled at a tin mining town in Kuala Lumpur. As experienced tinsmiths, they produced and sold a variety of household items made of tin. The Yong brothers later went into the manufacturing and sale of pewter products.

In 1968, Yong Poh Shin, the grandson of Yong Koon Seng, opened the first overseas Selangor Pewter factory in Singapore next to the Paya Lebar Airport, first producing simple tin cups to later other household items such as vases and tourist souvenirs. The company changed its name to Royal Selangor Pewter in 1979 when the former Sultan of Selangor Royal Highness Sultan Salahuddin Abdul Aziz Shah appointed Selangor Pewter as his royal pewterers.

Royal Selangor Pewter’s Singapore factory was relocated to the Jurong Industrial Estate in 1993, but it later ceased its operation due to rising production costs. It continued to maintain its retail presence by importing its products from its Malaysian factory.

46. Lea Hin Butterfly Brand Kerosene Lanterns and Stoves

Lea Hin started in 1935 as a sole proprietorship selling mainly kerosene stoves, pressure lanterns, pressure oil tanks and burners. The company, located in a Mosque Street shophouse, was established by Woo Kai Lea. In early Singapore, Lea Hin’s kerosene-related products, under the Butterfly trademark, were popular as electricity supplies were not always available or dependable. Thus, many street hawkers, fishermen and industrial workers used to buy kerosene lanterns and stoves from Lea Hin.

Lea Hin set up its factory at the junction of Alexandra Road and Leng Kee Road in the fifties. It later ventured into the production of steel casement windows, marketed under the Star brand, and supplied them to HDB projects that required window grilles, roller shutters and aluminium sliding windows.

In 1977, Woo Siew Hin, the son of Woo Kai Lea, took over the business and diversified the company’s business to include epoxy powder for industrial coating application and a range of electrical products marketed under the Farfalla brand. Its Butterfly brand kerosene lanterns and stoves are now produced in Indonesia and exported to the African, South Pacific and North American markets.

Transport

47. Mercedes-Benz

Cycle & Carriage was first founded by the Chua brothers at Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in 1899. It was formerly called Federal Store which mainly dealt with trading of nutmegs and other sundries. The brothers later expanded their business to include the sale of bicycles and motorcycles, and established its first Singapore branch at Orchard Road in 1916. By 1926, Singapore became Cycle & Carriage’s headquarters.

In 1951, Cycle & Carriage acquired the franchise for the Mercedes-Benz marque, but the sales were slow as cars were very expensive then. By the sixties, the business was picking up and Cycle & Carriage set up a $2.5-million assembly factory at Hillview Avenue. The new factory, which also assembled Daihatsu and Isuzu trucks, as well as Volkswagen cars, had a production capacity of 3,000 vehicles yearly. In the same year, Cycle & Carriage also opened a $5-million showroom at Liat Towers.

The assembly plant eventually closed in 1980 due to high production costs, and Cycle & Carriage diversified its business to food and property markets. It became a subsidiary of Jardine Matheson Group in 2002.

48. Bridgestone Tyres

Bridgestone Tyres, whose main customers included General Motors and Ford, was founded in 1931 by Japanese Shojiro Ishibashi. The tyre-making company expanded overseas in the sixties and established its first post-war overseas factory at Jurong in 1965 in a joint venture with Pan-Malaysia Rubber Industries. 31 Bridgestone staff were dispatched from Japan to assist in the operations while 25 local personnel were sent to the Bridgestone factory in Japan for trainings.

Bridgestone Singapore recorded healthy sales in the sixties and seventies, but the abolition of import duty on tyres in 1980 eventually led to the stop of production and cease of operation of the Bridgestone factory in Singapore. The company continued to thrive globally, and became the world’s largest manufacturer of tyres after it acquired Firestone Tyre & Rubber Company in 1988.

49. Elephant Brand Bicycles

In December 1967, Southeast Asia’s first bicycle factory was opened in Jurong by the Malaysia Associated Industries Ltd, partnered by both Malaysian and Singaporean industrialists. At the start, the factory manufactured 40% of the parts required for the production of bicycles, while importing the other parts from Japan and Europe. The factory’s production was designed by A. Helmboldt, a German technical expert who personally supervise the training of the factory workers.

The factory manufactured and sold bicycles to both the local and oversea markets, under several brands such as Elephant, Flying Horse and Golden Eagle. But the production lasted only five years, and came to a halt in 1971 as it could not compete against the lower-cost bicycles made in China, Japan, Taiwan and India. The company was the renamed Swiss Associated Industries and switched to the manufacture of watch cases.

50. Ford Motorcars

The Ford Motor Company of Malaya was established in Singapore in 1926, serving as the company’s headquarters in Southeast Asia, which supplied and distributed Ford automobiles in British Malaya, Dutch East Indies, Thailand and Borneo. The company set up its office at Dunlop House on Robinson Road, and its assembly plant was located at Tanjong Pagar’s Enggor Street, which later shifted to a railway warehouse along Prince Edward Road.

In 1941, the company moved to its new building along Upper Bukit Timah Road. That was the famous Ford Factory, which became the site where Lieutenant-General Arthur E. Percival, the British General Officer Commanding Malaya, signed the document surrendering Singapore to Japan on 15 February 1942. During the Japanese Occupation, the factory was taken over and used to produce Japanese military vehicles.

After the war, the British took over the factory and used it for repair and precision works. It was only returned to Ford Motor Company in 1947. The plant continued its production and assembly works until 1980, when it was closed due to rising production costs.

Editor’s Note: All contents of the products are taken and summarised from the “50 Made in Singapore Products” Exhibition.

Published: 25 July 2015

Fifty years, fifty old and new photos of Singapore, and fifty familiar names, events and landmarks that helped to shape and define Singapore between 1965 and 2015.

To celebrate SG50, let us take a look at Singapore’s enormous progress and achievements as a new nation in the past five decades.

1965

With tears in his eyes, former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew announced the separation of Singapore from Malaysia on 9 August 1965. A new nation was born.

1966

Singapore held its first ever National Day Parade (NDP) at the City Hall on the morning of 9 August 1966, where six People’s Defence Force contingents participated.

1967

The National Service (Amendment) Act was passed and came into effect on 17 March 1967. Around 9,000 male youths were called up to form the country’s first batch of national servicemen.

1968

Established on 1 June 1968, the Jurong Town Corporation (JTC) was tasked with the development of industrial estates and setting up of factories at Jurong, Kranji and Sungei Kadut.

1969

Developed by the Singapore Improvement Trust (SIT) and completed by Housing and Development Board (HDB), Queenstown, the first satellite town in Singapore, had almost 20,000 dwelling units by 1969.

1970

In 1970, Golden Shoe, lying at the heart of Singapore’s Central Business District (CBD), was embarked in its first urban redevelopment project by the government.

1971

The $3.5-million Jurong Bird Park was opened on 3 January 1971. Home to more than 8,000 birds of 600 species, it is Asia’s largest bird park and has the world’s tallest man-made waterfall.

1972

In 1972, a $5-million street hawkers’ resettlement program was launched with hawker centres built at Serangoon Gardens, MacPherson, St Michael’s Estate and Telok Ayer, following the success of the first hawker centre at Yung Sheng Road, opened a year earlier.

1973

The 50,000-capacity National Stadium had a grand opening on 21 July 1973. For three decades, it had been the venue of many Southeast Asian (SEA) Games, Malaysian Cup football matches and National Day Parades.

1974

On 13 November 1974, the Singapore Zoological Gardens, officially opened just 18 months earlier, received its one millionth visitor.

1975

Toa Payoh Town Garden, one of Singapore’s oldest and most iconic parks located in a residential town, was completed and opened in 1975.

1976

The Toa Payoh Town Garden was also home to the first version of the iconic Dragon Playground, which was a hit among children in 1976. It gave rise to the popular locally-designed sand playgrounds at the new towns in the eighties and nineties.

1977

The first Lion City Cup was held at the National Stadium and Jalan Besar Stadium between 8 and 18 December 1977. The Singapore team, featuring a teenage Fandi Ahmad, won the tournament by beating six participating Malaysian states.

1978

The Singapore River in 1978 was filled with goods-ferrying wooden bumboats called tongkangs and twakows. They would be cleared five years later in the River Clean-Up Campaign.

1979

The first National Courtesy Campaign was launched on 1 June 1979, with the catchy slogan “Make Courtesy Our Way of Life”. The iconic mascot Singa would be introduced three years later.

1980

In 1980, the Housing and Development Board (HDB) completed Ang Mo Kio, one of the earliest and largest new towns in Singapore, after seven years of development.

1981

Named after the second President of Singapore, the majestic 1.8km-long Benjamin Sheares Bridge was opened on 29 September 1981 after three years of construction.

1982

To further enhance the popularity of Sentosa as an upcoming resort destination, a monorail system was built and opened in February 1982 to ferry visitors around the island.

1983

Singapore hosted the 12th Southeast Asian Games (SEA Games), its second hosting after the 7th SEA Games in 1973, between 28 May and 6 June 1983. Singapore finished fourth in the tournament with 38 gold medals, 38 silvers and 58 bronzes.

1984

The iconic National Theatre, dubbed as the “People’s Theatre”, held its last show in January 1984 before the building was demolished two years later.

1985

Singapore’s annual street parade Chingay was held at Orchard Road for the first time on 24 February 1985, attracting thousands of spectators.

1986

Changi Airport welcomed its 10 millionth passenger in 1986 after almost five years of operation. Two decades later, the airport would receive 10 million visitors in just a year.

1987

On 7 November 1987, Singapore’s Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) system began operation between North-South (NS) Line’s Yio Chu Kang and Toa Payoh stations.

1988

The first Swing Singapore was held at Orchard Road in August 1988.  As many as 250,000 people turned up at the massive street party filled with lights and music.

1989

Dismantled earlier due to the MRT tunnelling works, the century-old Telok Ayer Market was reassembled in 1989 in a $6.8-million renovation project. It was renamed Lau Pa Sat after its completion.

1990

A packed National Stadium rallied to support the Singapore team in the Malaysia Cup final against Kedah in August 1990. Singapore lost but would go on to win the cup four years later, before its exit of the tournament.

1991

With the completion of the underground tunnels, the last section of the Central Expressway (CTE) was officially opened on 21 September 1991. The completed CTE, 16km long, took almost a decade and $500 million in construction.

1992

City Hall, an important landmark in Singapore during the colonial period, self-government and post-independence eras, was gazetted as a national monument on 14 February 1992.

1993

On 21 September 1993, Ngee Ann City was added to Orchard Road‘s impressive list of popular shopping malls that already boasted of Tangs, Plaza Singapura, The Centrepoint and Wisma Atria.

1994

The Night Safari, the world’s first nocturnal zoo, was opened on 26 May 1994. Occupying an area of 35 hectares at Mandai Lake Road, it cost almost $63 million in its construction.

1995

The 37m-tall tower in the shape of Merlion, Singapore’s famous icon, at Sentosa was completed in late 1995. It was commissioned by the Sentosa Development Corporation and cost $13 million.

1996

Following its exit from the Malaysia Cup, Singapore launched its own domestic league called the Singapore Professional Football League, or S-League, in 1996. The first league winner was Geylang United Football Club.

1997

On 1 October 1997, the Port of Singapore Authority (PSA) was corporatised to continue the operation of Singapore’s container terminals, which by then was handling more than 10 million twenty-foot equivalent unit (TEU) of containers a year.

1998

Composed by Dick Lee and sung by Kit Chan, “Home“, the National Day song commissioned for the 1998 National Day Parade, was one of many Singaporeans’ favourite National Day songs.

1999

The 1999 Singapore Art Festival was held at the Fort Canning Hill, one of Singapore’s earliest recorded landmarks and home to former Majaphahit kings and British governors.

2000

The Fullerton Building, one of the well-known landmarks of Singapore’s historic waterfront, was restored and refurbished into a boutique hotel named Fullerton Hotel, which opened in May 2000.

2001

On 19 January 2001, a new official version of “Majulah Singapura“, Singapore’s national anthem, was launched to make it easier for Singaporeans to sing as many could not reach the high notes in the original version.

2002

The Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay, or fondly known as “Durian”, was opened on 12 October 2002. It has a 1,600-seat concert hall and a 2,000-capacity performing arts theatre.

2003

Formerly the venue for exhibitions, fairs and conferences, as well as the 1987 Miss Universe Pageant, the World Trade Centre was renovated and reopened on 20 June 2003 as HarbourFront Centre.

2004

The red-bricked National Library, an iconic landmark at Stamford Road, closed its doors for the last time on 31 March 2004, and was subsequently demolished for the construction of Fort Canning Tunnel.

2005

The world-famous Raffles Hotel, known as the “Grand Lady of the Far East” during the colonial times, was sold on 18 July 2005 to an US investment fund. Five years later, it would change hands again, this time to a Qatar sovereign wealth fund.

2006

The former Ford Factory, the historical site where the British officially surrendered to the Japanese during the Second World War, was gazetted as a national monument on 15 February 2006.

2007

In 2007, on its 30th anniversary, the Singapore Science Centre, located at Jurong East, was renamed as Science Centre Singapore.

2008

On 29 September 2008, the first Formula One Singapore Grand Prix race was held at the Marina Bay Street Circuit; it was the first ever night race in Formula One’s history.

2009

In December 2009, the Singapore Flyer created the tallest Christmas tree in Singapore. It was 83m tall and made up of 91,000 LED lights.

2010

Singapore held the first Youth Olympic Games (YOG) between 14 and 26 June 2010, a multi-sport tournament that involved 3,600 young athletes from 205 countries.

2011

Singapore’s signature city skyline welcomed a new addition when the Marina Bay Sands held their grand opening on 15 February 2011.

2012

The National Parks Board’s (NParks) vision of creating a City in a Garden became a reality on 29 June 2012 when the Bay South of Gardens by the Bay was officially opened.

2013

The 5km-long Marina Coastal Expressway (MCE), Singapore’s first underwater expressway and 10th expressway, was officially opened on 29 December 2013.

2014

River Safari, Asia’s first river-themed zoo, was opened on 28 February 2014. It has the world’s largest freshwater aquarium and houses 6,000 animals of 200 species.

2015

On 4 July 2015, the 156-year-old Singapore Botanic Gardens was successfully inscribed as the nation’s first UNESCO World Heritage Site.

We have come a long way. A great 50th birthday to Singapore!

Published: 28 July 2015

Singapore’s mobile population penetration rate stands at almost 155% (from the 2014 statistics by Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore). That is more than a mobile line per person. Despite the large number of mobile subscriptions, public phones still play a part in Singapore’s society, providing telecommunication services for domestic maids, foreign workers and others who do not possess mobile phones.

Public phones in Singapore arguably reached their peak in the eighties and nineties, when they were almost present in every housing estates, hawker centres and shopping malls. This could be a coincidence with the rise of pagers in the same era, when pager’s users often had to make returning calls to the paging initiators.

From STB To SingTel

The first telephones were introduced in Singapore as early as 1879. Two years later, Bennett Pell, the manager of the Eastern Extension Telegraph Company, used a simple manual 50-line switchboard to set the first Private Telephone Exchange at Collyer Quay. He later also established a trial connection between Raffles Square and Tanjong Pagar using a telegraph line, making Singapore the first British colony in the East to have a telephone system.

In 1955, the British colonial government formed the Singapore Telephone Board (STB), which would merge with Telecommunication Authority of Singapore in 1974 to form Telecoms. In 1982, Telecoms, after installing more than 500,000 private and public telephone lines, merged again with the Postal Service Department. By 1990, a significant milestone was reached when Singapore installed its one millionth telephone line.

Telecoms, by the late nineties, had become the most profitable statutory board, holding assets that exceeded $4.2 billion in value. As part of a three-year corporatisation program, the Singapore government restructured Telecoms to become Singapore Telecom (SingTel), and public listed it on the stock exchange in 1993.

The Coin-Operated Phones

Public phones were uncommon in Singapore in the fifties and sixties, especially in areas from the city. For example, until the late fifties, the Sembawang Hills Estate only had one public phone serving 6,500 residents.

It was only after several complaints that the Singapore Telephone Board decided to install the second public phone near the Shell petrol station at Sembawang Hills Estate in 1960.

To improve the situation, the Singapore Telephone Board carried out the installation of more than 50 public phones in Singapore in 1962, half of them in rural places. In the early sixties, there were about 250 public phones in Singapore, in a ratio of 3.75 phones to every 100 persons. It was ranked higher than Hong Kong (3.2), Bangkok (1.8) and Saigon (0.9). By 1965, the number of public phones in Singapore had increased to almost 650.

In the late seventies, the Ministry of National Development embarked on a plan to double the density of public phones from seven to 14 per square kilometre. This was mainly due to the long waiting time in the application of private telephone lines. Under the Telecoms plan, all the new four- and five-room HDB flats came with telephone lines. However, the rate was only 15%, 50% and 75% for one-, two- and three-room flats respectively.

This led to a surge in the application of new telephone lines; in 1977, more than 3,000 people applied for residential lines per month, and in some areas, the waiting time could be as long as 18 months. As a stop-gap measure, Telecoms carried out their “one phone for each block” plan; at least one public coin phone was to be installed at the ground floor of each HDB block.

The public phones in the seventies typically had round booths in bright orange colour that were secured onto the walls, completed with thick phone books filled with names, addresses and contact numbers. They would be later replaced by the Telecoms’ booths that were in standalone or wall-mounted versions designed in shades of red.

In 1978, a strange incident happened at Florence Road of Upper Serangoon. A youth was reported to be struck by lightning on his left ear when he used a public phone during a thunderstorm. The following investigation, however, indicated that the phone was not damaged and in fine working condition. As a precautionary measure, Telecoms issued a statement to urge the public not to use public phones during thunderstorms.

The public phone services in the late eighties brought significant revenues for Telecoms. In 1987, Telecoms raked in $20.4 million from their public payphones; a year later, the amount rose to a record $24 million. The cash earned from the local calls made by public phones, however, was small change to the company, which reported a profit of $1.5 billion in 1987. A large portion, about $700 million, was from the international calls made from Singapore.

The public coin phones, however, were often subjected to issues such as maintainability, reliability, vandalism and theft. Coin collectors hired by Telecoms had to be regularly dispatched to the 25,000 public phones in Singapore. In many incidents, the phones were prised open and had their coins stolen. These factors led to Telecoms pondering the possibility of a cashless public phone system in Singapore. By the late eighties, the company decided to switch to the cardphone system by 1991.

The Rise of Cardphones

The switch from coin-operated payphone system to card-operated phone system took place in the mid-eighties. The first cardphone was introduced by the Telecoms in 1985 as an one-year trial to gauge the public response and their general acceptance in using pre-paid phone cards, which were issued in simple designs that indicated their stored values in the denominations of $2, $5 and $10. The $20 and $50 phonecards were introduced at a later time.

In late 1985, some 47 cardphones were installed at major shopping complexes, Changi Airport and the Woodlands Checkpoint. Surveys were carried out to find out customers’ preferences, as well as to assess the operational and technical aspects of the new telecommunication equipments. At the start, three types of card technology were tested; magnetic cards, cards with hologram technology and cards with built-in programmed integrated circuit chips. The following year also saw the 47 cardphones modified to allow users to dial directly to as many as 155 countries in the world.

By the late eighties, the success of cardphones led to many of them installed at post offices and the Telecoms outlets, and also places that demanded high phone usages, such as Raffles Place and Hill Street.

To prevent call hogging at these busy districts, coin phones and cardphones were often placed side by side, and the cardphones were programmed such that they could only make oversea calls. This was to discourage users from hogging the cardphones with local calls. In September 1992, the Telecommunication Authority of Singapore (TAS) opened up the market to private competitors, who brought in coin-operated phone models that had more user-friendly features, such as volume control.

In the same year, Singapore Telecom also purchased 6,000 sets of new cardphones. Costing $20 million, the new models were used to replace the older version of cardphones islandwide. The public listed company would spend another $19 million to upgrade the public phone services again in 1998. Between the nineties and early 2000s, two versions of cardphones were commonly found in Singapore. However, this did not signal the end of the public coin phones. Many of them had co-existed with the cardphones, and entering the new decade, the new models possessed both the coin- and card-operated functions.

The phone cards soon became popular collectible items. Singapore Telecom would design the front of the phonecards with pictures showcasing various Singapore landscapes, heritage, food and festivals. The phonecards later also served as advertising platforms for companies such as Fujifilm, Dulux and Konica, which would launch their own series. The stored values were indicated at the back of each phonecards. Small holes were punched onto the printed arrows to indicated the remaining values after usage.

The Good Ol’ Coinafon

In 1971, the Singapore Telephone Board also introduced the Coinafon, the iconic squarish orange-coloured payphone that could be typically found outside provision shops and kopitiams. Some were installed at private housing estates. For example, in the eighties, Coinafons, together with their wooden telephone booths, could be found along roads outside the terrace houses at Upper Paya Lebar.

The early Coinafons belonged to the rotary dial type. In 1984, Telecoms introduced the newer Coinafon model that came with push buttons and a digital display. It provided greater convenience to the users and also allowed them to check whether the numbers they dialed were correct. The rental charges for Coinafons for private owners ranged between $700 to almost $900 per annum. Telecoms would later stop selling these phones, but the durable Coinafons survive the test of time and can still be found at some of the older shops in Singapore today.

Public phones once played an important part in everyday life in Singapore. To make an urgent call home while having a late night out. Or waiting anxiously beside the public phone after paging someone. In army camps, dozens of recruits queued up at nights to make calls to their families and loved ones. By the late nineties, public phones’ popularity began to decline as mobile phones made their way into the life of common Singaporeans. By the early 2000s, mobile population penetration rate had jumped to more than 80%.

Today, there are still as many as 11 licensed operators in Singapore to provide public phone services, although most of Starhub’s public payphones had been phased out in 2010.

Published: 19 August 2015

When former Housing Development Board (HDB) interior designer Khor Ean Ghee was tasked to design a series of playgrounds for Singapore’s upcoming new towns and housing estates in the seventies, he took inspirations from animals and objects that could provide a sense of familiarity and identity to Singaporeans.

Thus in the late seventies, the popular animal-themed sand-pit playgrounds were created, in the shapes of dragons, tigers, elephants, pelicans, doves and sparrows. Most of them lasted until the late nineties, when they were replaced by the safer modern plastic playgrounds. Several of these old-school playgrounds still exist in different parts of Singapore today, with the dragon playground at Toa Payoh the most iconic of all.

First Dragon, Toa Payoh Town Garden (Demolished)

When Khor Ean Ghee first designed the dragon playground, it was not well-received by the management. The metal structure was difficult to be manufactured, and the paint on the dragon head faded easily. The body was too long and there were only monkey bars. Nevertheless, the playground proved to be popular among the children when the first one was built at the Toa Payoh Town Garden in 1975.

In his later version, Khor Ean Ghee pixelated the dragon head and tail with glass mosaics that could retain its colour throughout the years. Glass mosaics of different colours were imported from Italy; warm coloured spectrum such as orange was used for the exterior of the playground structure, while the interior was made up of the cooler blue glass mosaics. To increase the fun factor of his playgrounds, Khor Ean Ghee also incorporated four key elements to his designs, which were the slides, swings, see-saws and merry-go-rounds.

The success of the playgrounds saw the same design duplicated in different housing estates and new towns, from Tampines to Jurong West. At its peak, there were dozens of them in Singapore. Only four dragon playgrounds have survived the test of time and escaped the fate of demolition today.

Orange Dragon, Toa Payoh Lorong 6

Probably the most iconic of all old-school playgrounds in Singapore today, the dragon playground at Toa Payoh Lorong 6 has fortunately been preserved by HDB, although it has seen some major changes in its surroundings recently. Block 28, the flat that stood beside the playground for more than three decades, was demolished in 2014.

Brown Dragon, Block 570 Ang Mo Kio Avenue 3

The dragon playground at Ang Mo Kio Avenue 3 does not have a high profile as compared to the one at Toa Payoh, probably due to the fact that has a duller colour and its sand-pit was replaced by the rubber mats commonly seen in the modern playgrounds.

Mini Orange Dragon, Block 201 Toa Payoh Lorong 1

Mini Red Dragon, Block 58 Circuit Road

The “mini” dragon playgrounds may have similarly-designed heads made up of mosaics, but they do not have the long metal spines seen in their larger cousins. Instead, their bodies are made up of spiral slides. There are only two such mini dragon playgrounds in Singapore today.

Green Dragon, Block 104 Tampines Street 11 (Demolished)

The HDB flats at Tampines Street 11 with its public amenities such as the dragon playground and basketball court were completed in around 1982. The flats and basketball court are still around today, but the green dragon playground had been replaced by a modern playground.

Orange Dragon, Block 664 Yishun Avenue 4 (Demolished)

This orange-head dragon with a red body was located between Block 664 and 665 at Yishun Avenue 4 in the eighties and nineties. Like others, it was also demolished and replaced by the modern playground.

Blue Dragon, Bedok North Street 2 (Demolished)

This blue dragon playground was located at Bedok North Street 2, near the Bedok Stadium, Bedok Swimming Complex and Bedok Fitness Park. A new tennis centre and the sepak takraw and Silat federations were later added to the vicinity, but the dragon had long disappeared.

Brown Dragon, Jurong West (Demolished)

This photo of a dragon playground at Jurong West was taken in the 2000s by local blogger Gordonator. It was probably demolished in 2007.

Blue Dragon, Undetermined Location (Demolished)

Have you played at dragon playgrounds before?

Do you still remember their former locations or have any old photos of the playgrounds?

Published: 30 August 2015

Pearls Centre, located along Eu Tong Sen Street, was a 22-storey residential-commercial building completed in 1977, although its 99-year lease began as early as 1969. It was a joint venture by Outram Realty, Keck Seng Pte Ltd and the Sim Lim Investment Group, under the private development of the Urban Renewal Programme, to construct a modern multi-functional complex at the bustling Pearl’s Hill district which, in the seventies, had several well-established malls such as the People’s Park Complex, People’s Park Plaza, People’s Park Centre and Ocean Garment Shopping Centre.

In the late seventies, Pearls Centre was heavily advertised in the newspapers for its luxury apartments, shopping units, theatre, night club, restaurants and a 7-storey carpark spacious enough for 380 cars. During its peak in the eighties and nineties, Pearls Centre was almost fully occupied with 199 shops in its 4-storey of shopping centre, mostly made up of small strata-titled retail businesses such as food and beverage stalls, coffee houses, travel agencies, beauty centres, tailor shops, traditional Chinese medicine stores and hairdressing salons.

In addition, there were 44 residential units in Pearls Centre’s 12-storey apartment tower made up of single-, double- and three-bedroom units. The apartments would cost between $65,000 and $190,000 in the seventies.

Pearls Centre also boasted one of the earliest versions of food courts in Singapore. On the fourth floor of the building, it housed Fast Food Centre, an air-conditioned hawker centre that was popular among office workers and cinema-goers when it was opened in February 1978. As many as 30 stalls, selling Chinese, Malay and Western food, operated in the hawker centre that could seat 450 people. The concept of enjoying hawker food in an air-conditioned environment led to the rise of food courts in Singapore since the eighties. Picnic Food Court, was dubbed as Singapore’s first food court, was opened at the now-defunct Scotts Shopping Centre.

One of the key tenants of Pearls Centre was the Yangtze Theatre (长江戏院), famous as the last cinema in Singapore to screen R-rated and soft porn movies. Originally named as the Pearls Theatre, it was changed to Yangtze, named after the longest river in China and Asia, upon its opening on 27 January 1977. In its early days, the 1,159-capacity cinema occupied six storeys inside Pearl’s Centre, with a gross floor area of 8,010 square metres.

Yangtze Theatre, in the seventies and eighties, used to screen Hong Kong kungfu movies mainly catered for the Chinese residents living near Chinatown. With its whitish and clean outlook, the cinema and apartment tower actually resembled the suburban cinemas and HDB flats built in the new towns such as Ang Mo Kio, Bedok and Clementi. The cinema, along with the nearby Majestic and Oriental theatres, proved to be popular entertainment venues within the Chinatown vicinity.

The ownership of Yangtze Theatre had changed hands several times over the years. In 1983, its owner Pearls Theatre Ltd, which also owned the Straits Theatre at Woodlands, faced a winding-up order by the High Court. Yangtze was subsequently forced to shut down and sold. Four years later, its new owner, a Malaysian investor, put the cinemas of Yangtze and Straits up for sale for $5 million and $1.8 million respectively. There were proposals to convert the premises into a church, offices or even a high-tech entertainment centre named “Fantasy World” catered for tourists, but none of the plans were successful.

With the failure in the conversion of its premises for other commercial usages, Yangtze Theatre was renovated and reopened in September 1991 as Yangtze 1 and Yangtze 2. Local artistes and Hong Kong stars such as Michelle Yim were invited for the grand opening. However, the cinema faced declining revenues due to the slowdown in the local movie industry in the nineties. In 1995, it was converted again, this time as an erotic films’ provider.

This business strategy lasted for more than a decade, before its management attempted to change the cinema’s image by including conventional movies and blockbusters in the late 2000s. But by then, the reputation of the cinema was already well perceived in the eyes of the public.

Thus, after a $350,000 renovation in 2011, Yangtze Theatre was reverted to the screening of erotic movies until its closure in 2015. The unsavoury reputation of Yangtze Theatre also affected the image of Pearls Centre, which, throughout the 2000s, was started to be tenanted by numerous shady massage parlours dealing in sex-related services. Regular reports of police raids of vice activities also caused Pearls Centre to appear in the wrong headlines.

In August 2012, the Singapore Land Authority (SLA) announced the acquisition of Pearls Centre for the construction of the new Thomson Line (TSL), where its site will be replaced with underground tunnels and a new high-density, mixed-use building that will be integrated with the current Outram MRT station. By August 2015, Pearls Centre was almost emptied with the departure of most of its tenants who have accepted the government’s compensation packages.

A last look at the now-vacated Pearls Centre while it awaits its impending demolition:

Published: 20 September 2015catered

Hillview Mansion. A name that is previously well-known and generates much interest among local paranormal investigators. Known as the “green” house, it was once ranked together with the Punggol Matilda House (“white” house) and the Pasir Ris “red” house as Singapore’s most haunted “coloured” houses in the late nineties and early 2000s.

But the history of the mysterious private residence goes back to the seventies, when the house was likely to be built after the Hillview vicinity was developed. In the late sixties, a network of minor roads, consists of Jalan Dermawan, Chu Lin Road, Jalan Gumilang and Jalan Remaja, was extended from the former Princess Elizabeth Estate, which was built in 1951. By the mid-seventies, the minor roads gave rise to the development of private residences collectively known as the Hillview Estate.

One end of Jalan Dermawan had initially stopped by the hill side. An extension was later constructed to link to the top of the hill which is the highest point at Hillview Estate. The steep 50m-long road leads to the Hillview Mansion, which, if it was ever completed, would enjoy a splendid panoramic view of its surroundings. Instead, its construction works were halted halfway, and it was left abandoned after that. For decades, speculations and rumours of Hillview Mansion and its abandonment had gripped the imaginations of many self-proclaimed urban explorers and ghost hunters.

The Hillview Mansion was reportedly owned by Chua Boon Peng (1918-2005), the former chairman of Cycle & Carriage (C&C) Industries Pte Ltd. Cycle & Carriage began in 1899 as Federal Stores, a small trading company located at Kuala Lumpur. It was founded by Chua Boon Peng’s uncles Chua Cheng Tuan (1876-1912) and Chua Cheng Bok (1880-1940). Chua Cheng Liat, who had the Liat Towers at Orchard Road named after him, was Chua Boon Peng’s father and younger brother of Chua Cheng Tuan and Chua Cheng Bok. In its early days, the humble firm traded nutmegs and then diversified to soap, paper and machine spare part businesses.

Cycle & Carriage later ventured into the selling of bicycles, motorcycles and cars. It established a branch at Orchard Road in 1916 and shifted its headquarters from Kuala Lumpur to Singapore in 1926. The year 1951 was a major breakthrough for Cycle & Carriage, when Chua Boon Peng clinched a sole distributorship agreement with Germany’s Daimler-Benz to sell Mercedes-Benz brand cars in Malaya.

In 1965, Cycle & Carriage opened a $2.5-million plant at Hillview to assemble Mercedes, Daihatsu, Isuzu and Volkswagen vehicles. The plant, however, suffered losses and had to shut down in 1980 due to significant increase in the production costs. Chua Boon Peng stepped down as the company’s chairman in 1985; the Chua family eventually exited Cycle & Carriage eight years later. The factory’s land, under the ownership of Cycle & Carriage, was redeveloped for private residential use in 1990. Hillview Villas, a mixture of semi-detached and terrace houses, was completed at the site of the former Hillview assembly plant after three years of construction.

Chua Boon Peng himself was said to have spent millions of dollars in the seventies snapping up plots of land near the Hillview assembly plant to build a grand mansion for his wife, and probably also to oversee his vast business empire at Hillview. Few, however, knew the reason behind the halted construction works of the house.

Many rumours had surfaced since then. The rumours came in different versions; the most popular one was that the “unlucky” house was abandoned after its mistress had fallen to her death. Other stories included a worker killed by lightning during the construction. There was one tale about a grisly murder case that took place inside the half-completed house. A more “logical” explanation would be that the Ministry of Defense (Mindef) wanted to reacquire the land where the mansion was planned to be built.

The half-completed Hillview Mansion was demolished in the mid-2000s. Today, there is nothing left of it except a pair of old gates. Once in a while, a few curious passers-by can be seen visiting its premises, but the interest in the mysteries of Hillview Mansion has considerably waned over time. Perhaps people come to realise that there is nothing supernatural about it. And while the “green” house had been completely demolished, the “white” house and “red” house are given new lease of life; in recent years they have been redeveloped into a clubhouse and childcare centre respectively.

Published: 06 October 2015

For over 150 years, the 3.2km-long Singapore River has played an important role in the economical growth of Singapore as a free port. Started from the mouth of the river, development gradually spread upstream. Population surged and trading activities flourished. By the early 20th century, the vicinities at Robertson Quay, Ho Puah Quah and Kim Seng were filled with ricemills, sawmills, boat yards, godowns and shophouses.

The increasing economic and social demands saw the need to link up the northern and southern sides of the river. Thus, bridges were built along the Singapore River to connect the north, where the government offices were located, and south banks, where cargo goods were unloaded from the boats.

Over the decades, the old bridges had been replaced by newer ones. Many had witnessed the transformation of the river and its surroundings in the past century. On 03 December 2009, five of the oldest bridges of the Singapore River were given the conservation status; they are the Anderson, Cavenagh, Elgin, Read and Ord Bridges, built between the mid-19th and early 20th century.

Singapore River’s Early Bridges

According to historical illustrations of old Singapore, the first bridge across the Singapore River was an unnamed wooden footbridge located near present-day Elgin Bridge. The bridge was built in 1819, the same year Sir Stamford Raffles founded Singapore.

Presentment Bridge
1822-1844

It was replaced three years later, by another wooden bridge named Presentment Bridge, also known as Jackson’s Bridge or Monkey Bridge. The Presentment Bridge later linked up North Bridge Road and South Bridge Road. The roads, named with reference to the bridge, were planned by George Drumgoole Coleman (1795-1844) and constructed in 1833 by his team of Indian convict labourers.

An Irish architect, George Coleman was the Superintendent of Public Works whose legacy included many roads, churches and buildings in Singapore of the early 19th century. The Coleman Bridge was named in honour of him, when it was completed in 1840 and became the Singapore River’s first ‘modern’ bridge made of bricks.

Thomson’s Bridge
1844-1862

Between 1827 and 1842, the Presentment Bridge was repaired many times. In 1844, the colonial government decided to demolish the bridge, and replace it with a new wooden footbridge. The new bridge was designed by John Turnbull Thomson (1821-1884), a British civil engineer and surveyor who designed and built many iconic structures and buildings such as the Dalhousie Obelisk, Horsburgh Lighthouse and Hajjah Fatimah Mosque.

Named Thomson’s Bridge, the footbridge was later widened to allow carriages to cross the river. In 1862, the bridge was replaced by an iron bridge imported from Calcutta, India (present-day Kolkata), and was renamed as Elgin Bridge.

ABC Bridge
undetermined-1884

ABC Bridge was a footbridge across the Singapore River where Clarke Quay is today. By the 1880s, the aging bridge was unable to cope with the growing demands between the northern and southern river banks, where godowns, wharfs and quay accommodations were rapidly increasing.

ABC Bridge was closed in 1884, and was replaced by the new Ord Bridge two years later.

Singapore River’s Heritage Bridges

Elgin Bridge
first 1862-1920s, second 1929-present

The first Elgin Bridge was built in 1862, when its iron-cast body was imported from Calcutta to replace the wooden Thomson’s Bridge. It was named after Lord James Bruce Elgin (1811-1863), the Governor-General of India from 1862 to 1863.

In the 1870s and 1880s, Elgin Bridge underwent widening and strengthening projects in order to meet the increasing demands and trading activities near the river, and also to allow the steamed tramways to cross the waterway. It was demolished on 24 December 1926 to pave way for the construction of a new Elgin Bridge.

The second Elgin Bridge was opened on 30 May 1929, after three years of construction by the Public Works Department. It was designed by local-based engineer T.C. Hood, who also designed the Crawford Bridge over present-day Rochor Canal. The bridge’s iron-cast lamp posts were designed by Cavalieri Rodolfo Nolli (1888-1963), the Italian sculptor and architect whose work included the reliefs for the Tanjong Pagar Railway Station, Old Supreme Court Building and College of Medicine Building.

The new Elgin Bridge was raised four feet higher than the previous one, so as to allow boats to pass under it during the high tides. It also had encased concrete around its steel structure, in order to prevent corrosion due to the fumes produced by the nearby factories and warehouses.

Fondly known as tee tiao kio (“iron suspension bridge”) by the local Chinese, Elgin Bridge was refurbished in 1989 and conserved in 2009.

Cavenagh Bridge
1869-present

British engineer Rowland Mason Ordish (1824-1886) left his legacy with his unique “Ordish” cable-stayed bridge design with the Cavenagh Bridge at the mouth of the Singapore River and the Albert Bridge, built in 1873, at London.

Cavenagh Bridge had gone through extensive loading tests. At its factory at Glasgow, Scotland, its components were bolted together and tested using loads four times of the bridge’s weight. With the successful result, the components were packed and shipped to Singapore. After its assembly, it went through another live loading test; this time a company of 120 Sepoy soldiers were ordered to march over it.

Cavenagh Bridge was named after Sir William Orfeur Cavenagh (1820-1891), the last India-appointed Governor of the Straits Settlements between 1859 and 1867. The bridge itself was built to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the founding of Crown Colony of the Straits Settlements.

Trams used to run on the Cavenagh Bridge. However, in the early 20th century, the heavy traffic was diverted to the newly-built Anderson Bridge. A sign was put up at the entrance of the Cavenagh Bridge, declaring off-limits to “vehicles exceeding 3 cwts (hundredweight, equivalent to 50.8kg), cattle and horses”. Since then, it has been used as a pedestrian bridge.

Cavenagh Bridge was used to be known by the local Chinese as hai kee tee tiao kio, which means “iron suspension bridge by the sea”. During the high tides, cargo-carrying bumboats could not pass under it and had to wait for the low tides. Due to this flaw, the later Elgin Bridge was designed to be four feet higher than its previous version. In 1987, the bridge underwent a $1.5-million restoration. Today, it is the oldest bridge across the Singapore River.

Ord Bridge
1886-present

Ordnance Bridge, Toddy Bridge, “Bridge of Three Letters” or the new ABC Bridge, Ord Bridge is a bridge of many names. Designed in simple form with symmetrical balustrades and girders, it was meant to replace the old ABC Bridge which spanned across the Singapore River at present-day Clarke Quay area.

A few weeks after its completion in July 1886, the Public Works Department suffered a public backlash due to a “misalignment” in the bridge’s northern abutment, causing the bridge to be unstable. Ord Bridge was named after Sir Harry St. George Ord (1819-1885), the first governor (1867-1873) directly appointed by Britain after the Straits Settlements was given the Crown Colony status. It was officially opened in 1886 by another Straits Settlements’ governor Sir Frederick Weld (1823-1891).

Many toddy and liquor shops used to be found near the Ord Bridge, which gave rise to its other name of Toddy Bridge. It was also used to be linked to four roads; Magazine Road and Hong Lim Quay (defunct today) on its southern end, and ABC Road (later renamed as Ord Road, defunct today) and River Valley Road on its northern side. There was also a large iron foundry near the bridge in the late 19th century.

Read Bridge
1889-present

Originally known as the Merchant Bridge (or Merchants’ Bridge), Read Bridge was named after William Henry Macleod Read (1819-1909), a prominent businessman, the President of the Municipality and Honorary Police Magistrate who lived in Singapore for 46 years.

In early 1887, after laying the first cylinder for the bridge, a 69-year-old William Read returned to London for his retirement. Two years later, the Read Bridge was officially opened by the newly-appointed Governor of the Straits Settlements Cecil Clementi Smith (1840-1916).

Read Bridge links the uppermost limit of Boat Quay, which had a sizable Teochew community in the old days. The labourers and rowers from the twakows and tongkangs would often gathered near the bridge to listen to the Teochew storytellers; the location would become well-known as a story-telling centre.

The vicinity was also fondly known as cha choon tau (literally means “firewood boat head” in Teochew) due to the jetties built for the firewood-carrying tongkangs from Indonesia. The local Malays and Hokkiens referred Read Bridge as jembatan kampong melaka and kam gong ma la kat kio (both means “Kampong Melaka bridge”) respectively. Kampong Melaka was a Malay village that used to exist near South Boat Quay. Its mosque Masjid Omar Kampong Melaka, built in 1820,  continues to flourish and is Singapore’s first and oldest mosque today.

In the early nineties, Read Bridge was restored in a $8.4-million project.

Anderson Bridge
1910-present

After three years of construction, the Anderson Bridge was opened on 12 March 1910 by Sir John Anderson (1858-1918), the Governor of the Straits Settlements between 1904 and 1911. It was designed by the Municipal Engineer Robert Peirce, who had Peirce Reservoir named after him, and was Singapore’s first steel bridge.

The 70m-long and 2.8m-wide bridge was constructed using 1,200 tonnes of steels imported from Britain; and its the non-structural parts such as the castings, railings and frames were fabricated by the Municipal workshops at River Valley Road. The bridge’s stone plaque was specially imported from Egypt, and high power gas lamps were used to lit up the bridge.

Upon its completion, the bridge’s total cost chalked up to £50,000, equivalent to $10 million Singapore dollars today. Due to the high cost, the bronze lions on each pedestal, originally designed by Peirce, were not added. The colonial government’s purpose in building a new bridge was to allow the heavier vehicles, horse and ox carts to cross the river, and also to relieve some of the overloading pressure faced by the nearby Cavenagh Bridge.

Anderson Bridge became a symbol of terror during the Japanese Occupation, when the Japanese would hang severed heads along the bridge to discourage the people from breaking the law. Its fortune changed after the Second World War; in the fifties, sixties and seventies, it became a favourite destination for lovers to take a stroll in the evening. Fondly known as Lovers’ Bridge, women would throw oranges into the river from the bridge during the last day of Chinese New Years, hoping to land a good husband.

Singapore’s Anderson Bridge has a twin in the Victoria Bridge at Brisbane, Australia. The latter, a fourth version, was designed by Australian Alfred Barton Brady. It was built in 1897 and replaced by a new Victoria Bridge in 1969.

Singapore River’s Other Old Bridges

Coleman Bridge
first 1840-1862, second 1865-1883, third 1886-1986, fourth 1990-present

In its 175-year history, there were four Coleman Bridges. The first was a brick bridge built in 1840. It was designed by and named after George Drumgoole Coleman, who was also Singapore’s first architect and the man behind the planning and construction of the North Bridge and South Bridge Roads.

As the second bridge built across the Singapore River after Presentment Bridge, the Coleman Bridge was also known as New Bridge. The road that was linked at its southern end became known as New Bridge Road. The bridge was 20 feet wide, and cost $8,700 in construction, a hefty amount during that time.

In 1862, due to the increasing traffic between the northern and southern sides of the Singapore River, the Municipal Commissioner proposed to replace the Coleman Bridge with a new one. Three years later, a new timber bridge was completed and was known as Canning Bridge, or the second Coleman Bridge.

The second Coleman Bridge was, however, structurally unsound. Thus a new iron bridge was proposed to replace the old and shaky timber bridge, which was demolished in 1883. In July 1886, the third Coleman Bridge was built. Lasting a century, the third Coleman Bridge was considered the most aesthetically attractive bridge across the Singapore River. It was designed with many arches and columns and had ornamental gas lamp posts by its flanks.

Before 1986, New Bridge Road, an one-way road then, was the only access across Coleman Bridge, linking to Hill Street. Eu Tong Sen Street previously ended at its intersection with Havelock Road. The widening of Coleman Bridge allowed it to become a two-way traffic scheme with Eu Tong Sen Street and New Bridge Road in opposite directions. The widening project, which took four years and was completed in 1990, retained much of the decorative features of its predecessor.

Clemenceau Bridge
first 1920s-1938, second 1940-1989, third 1991-present

Clemenceau Avenue (formerly Tank Road) and Clemenceau Bridge were named after Georges Benjamin Clemenceau (1841-1929), the French Prime Minister (1906-1909, 1917-1920) who led his nation against Germany in the First World War. Georges Clemenceau had visited Malaya and Singapore on an eastern tour in the 1920s.

In 1938, a new bridge was built to replace the old corroding Clemenceau Bridge. Supervised by G.M. Wheat, the project, costing $250,000, was Singapore’s first bridge built with web girders. Measuring more than 100 yards long and 60 feet wide, the reinforced-concrete bridge was known as the new Pulau Saigon Bridge before it was renamed as Clemenceau Bridge in 1940.

Until the early seventies, Clemenceau Bridge was linked between the northern bank of the Singapore River and Pulau Saigon. On the tiny island, it merged with Pulau Saigon Road (now expunged) and was led southwards to Pulau Saigon Circus, which provided accesses to Havelock Road, Magazine Road and Chin Swee Road.

The vehicular bridges in which Pulau Saigon Road spanned over the river were simply known as Bridge No. 1 and Bridge No. 2. After Pulau Saigon was reclaimed and merged with the southern side of the Singapore River in the early seventies, Bridge No. 1 was relegated as a footbridge, whereas Bridge No. 2 was demolished.

This footbridge was demolished in the late eighties, together with the expunging of Pulau Saigon Road, during the second phase of the Central Expressway (CTE) project. In 1989, the CTE was extended to cut through the city between Bukit Timah and Chin Swee Roads. The old four-lane Clemenceau Bridge was also demolished and replaced by a new eight-lane one.

Pulau Saigon Bridge
first 1891-1986, second 1997-present

There were two Pulau Saigon Bridges in history, spanning across the Singapore River but located at different locations.

The original Pulau Saigon Bridge, previously located beside present-day Clemenceau Bridge, was built in 1891 and cost $71,000 of Municipal money. It linked up Pulau Saigon and the northern side of the river and was known as Pulau Saigon Bridge No. 1. Bridge No. 2, completed a year later, connected the island with the river’s southern bank.

The Pulau Saigon Bridge was raised in the early 1930s so as to allow bumboats to pass under it during the high tides. It was due to be demolished after the new Clemenceau Bridge was completed in 1940, but the demolition plans were shelved.

When Pulau Saigon was reclaimed in the seventies, the bridge was converted into a footbridge; its access to Merbau Road was cut off. The vehicular traffic was diverted to Clemenceau Bridge. It was not until September 1986, when the extensively rusted bridge was taken down to make way for the development of the CTE. In an 2-hour operation, the bridge’s joints on both ends were cut and the body lowered onto a barge. The dismantled steel pieces were then shipped to a Jurong scrapyard and sold for $22,000.

In 1997, a new 43m-long bridge was constructed 400m away from the original Pulau Saigon Bridge. The new Pulau Saigon Bridge links Saiboo Street to Havelock Road, cutting the travelling time between Orchard and Havelock Roads. The five-lane bridge is designed with granite pedestrian walkways and a 60m-long pedestrian underpass.

Kim Seng Bridge
first 1885-1950s, second 1954-present

The first Kim Seng Bridge, named after prominent Peranakan merchant and philanthropist Tan Kim Seng (1805-1864), was built in 1890. Spanning over the river near the Great World, its location was said to be the source of the Singapore River.

In the early 1950s, the increasingly heavy traffic and bottleneck at Kim Seng Road led to the planning of a new Kim Seng Bridge proposed by the City Council. In 1954, using pre-stressed concrete and high tensile steel, the new bridge was built at a cost of $370,000. Twice the size of its predecessor, the 26m-long and 20m-wide bridge was designed to meet heavy traffic conditions with its ability to hold a load of 13 tons per square metre.

Singapore River’s Other Bridges

The other bridges of the Singapore River are the Esplanade Bridge (opened in 1997), Robertson Bridge (1998), Alkaff Bridge (1999) and Jiak Kim Bridge (1999).

The latest is the $19.7-million Jubilee Bridge, opened to public in March 2015.

Published: 25 October 2015

When Coney Island, also known as Pulau Serangoon, was opened to the public on 10 October 2015, most are more interested and eager to spot the lonely Brahman bull that has roamed the tiny island for many years. Few, however, are aware that there is another lonely “figure” which has stood on the island for decades. It is the Haw Par Beach Villa, located at the mangrove area in the central part of Coney Island.

Coney Island

In history, two Singapore islands have been given the name of Coney Island – Pulau Satumu and Pulau Serangoon. The former, also called Pulau Setumu, is situated in the south-western side of Singapore and is home to the historic Raffles Lighthouse.

The name Coney Island did not restrict to the outlying islands. Probably influenced by the popularity of New York’s world-famous Coney Island, the name had been commonly used by the local entrepreneurs. In 1947, a proposed holiday resort by the sea at Tanjong Balai, off Jurong Road, was named Coney Island. The Happy World Amusement Park, in 1949, also planned to introduce a miniature Coney Island entertainment centre between Geylang Road and Serangoon Road.

Haw Par Island

Before the fifties, Pulau Serangoon was known instead as Haw Par Island. It was then owned by the prominent Burmese-born Aw brothers, Aw Boon Haw (1882-1954) and Aw Boon Par (1888-1944), who built a huge business empire with their trademark Tiger Balm ointment.

In 1937, Aw Boon Haw built his beach villa on Pulau Serangoon after purchasing the island. At their peak, the Aw family owned many properties in Singapore, including the famous Haw Par Villa, the Haw Par Mansion and the Jade House. During the Japanese Occupation, many of the Aw family’s properties were heavily damaged. The destroyed villa and the death of his beloved brother affected Aw Boon Haw badly. He passed away in 1954 on his return trip to Hong Kong.

By the eighties, Haw Par Villa was handed to the Singapore Tourism Board whereas the Jade House at Nassim Road was demolished. As for Haw Par Island, Aw Boon Haw sold it after the war to a local Indian businessman named Ghulam Mahmood. It was, by then, a popular spot for picnicking and organised water sports.

The Island’s Development

In 1950, Ghulam Mahmood planned to invest $100,000 to convert Haw Par Island into a holiday resort island. Calling the isle “Coney Island”, Ghulam Mahmood wanted it to be specially catered for the working and middle class people, where they could enjoy various facilities used for swimming, boating, fishing, skating and other indoor and outdoor activities. He also visioned the island to have restaurants, bars, dance halls as well as cottages for honeymoon couples. The proposal, however, did not work out well.

Over the years, the 32-acre (approximate 13 hectares) island changed ownerships several times. It was owned by a Thai businessman in the early seventies, who tried to sell it off at $1 million without success. In 1974, Coney Island and its foreshores were reclaimed and expanded by the Port of Singapore Authority (PSA) in a $20-million project, which also included the construction of a bridge between the island and the mainland. The planned conversion of the island into a recreational centre, however, came to nothing.

The Beach Villa

Designed in Modern architectural style, likely by Ho Kwang Yew, a leading architect during the 1930s, the beach villa consisted of a main building and a service block that occupied 600 square metres and 100 square metres respectively. The main building was built with a central hall and an open veranda that surrounded the house. At one corner, there was a water well, presumably to supply fresh water to the occupants.

For many years, Coney Island was only accessible from Punggol and Changi Points. It was a popular destination among the locals for fishing, swimming, bird-watching, water-skiing, picnicking and camping activities. Hence, it was no surprise that the Haw Par Beach Villa was once a haunting topic among the picnickers and campers. The stories ended when the island was closed in the late nineties during the Punggol 21 development, when its size doubled to 50 hectares through land reclamations.

As for the beach villa, it remains forgotten until recently, when Coney Island opens up to the public once more.

Published: 01 November 2015

If you visit the Botanic Gardens via the Tanglin gates, you may have notice the iconic Tembusu tree and find it familiar. That is because the tree, with its signature low stretching branch, is used as a motif on our current 5-dollar note.

Native to Singapore, the Tembusu trees, whose scientific name is fagraea fragrans, are hard-wooded evergreen trees that strive even on poor clayey soils. In the wild, the trees will often grow up to 40m in height, with large low-lying branches that have upswept ends. Named as one of Singapore’s heritage trees, the Tembusu trees, during their flowering seasons in May/June and October/November, will bear small orange berries and creamy moth-attracting flowers that open and give off a strong fragrance in the evening.

The signature Tembusu tree at the Botanic Gardens was more than 150 years old; it was already standing there before the Botanic Gardens was founded and laid in 1859 by an agri-horticultural society. Since then, it had witnessed the changes of the garden in the past one and a half century. The Botanic Gardens was taken over by the British colonial government in 1874 and during the Japanese Occupation, it was administrated by a Japanese professor and renamed as Shōnan Botanic Gardens. Today, the 74-hectare Gardens is managed by the National Parks Board.

The current Singapore 5-dollar note belongs to the Portrait Series, the fourth currency series of Singapore after its independence. The back design of the greenish note, officially issued on 9 September 1999, features the exact Tembusu tree that stands in the grounds of the Botanic Gardens.

Iconic landmarks in Singapore have been commonly used as the back designs of the former and current Singapore currency notes. Examples are the Supreme Court Building, Clifford Pier, Victoria Theatre, The Istana, Benjamin Sheares Bridges and Changi Airport, which have all been used as motifs in the previous Orchid, Bird and Ship series. The dollar notes’ motif designs sometimes also tell a Singapore’s history. For instance, the back of the Orchid Series’ 1-dollar note, released in mid-1967, features the Tanglin Halt flats, which were built in 1962. Fondly known as chup lau chu (“10-storey building” in Hokkien), these early HDB flats had existed for more than 50 years but eventually could not stand the test of time. Most of its tenants had moved out since 2008, and the vacant blocks will be demolished by end of 2015.

Published: 19 November 2015