I hope all the original museums can roll up to this standard
📝Singapore Travelogue part16: Chinatown Heritage Centre📝
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The Chinatown Heritage Centre is one of the busiest attractions in Singapore, an unassuming three-story shophouse on Chinatown Street. From the outside, it looks only a few meters wide, but inside it is very long and thin, making it quite interesting to explore. The entire heritage centre realistically restores the interior decoration and layout of this shophouse in Chinatown during the 1950s. Here, there are not only inanimate objects, but also the past of each resident, who have names, identities, professions, interests, sorrows, and joys. You can see their photos here, hear their stories, and travel back in time to 60 years ago.
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The shop owner's family were tailors, and the shop was called Teck Cheong Tailor. The sewing machines, mannequins, and various fabrics and threads in the shop are all as they were originally. Several members of their family were squeezed into a small room behind the tailor's shop front. But at least they could afford electric fans, theatre tickets, and more than one photograph, which was much better than the bare room of the two apprentice students next door.
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Upstairs, there was a small compartment with several bunks, rented out to rickshaw pullers by the bunk. Usually, two or three pullers would rent one bunk. They would come back to sleep in shifts, day and night. On the bed lay quietly the big opium pipe that the puller smoked. The audio guide explains so clearly why they smoked opium and how expensive it actually was, making it so heartbreaking to listen to. The next compartment was rented to a mobile dessert stall, and the one next to that to a clog-maker, who was skilled and did good business, with his home filled with shoes.
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A slightly more spacious compartment near the street was rented by a down-and-out physician. Although he was not very wealthy himself, he often did not charge poor patients when he saw them. The next room was rented by several lifelong unmarried women who had adopted the doctor's young daughter. Although they were all tenants, they lived as if they were one family. Another compartment was rented by a similarly thin woman with a red headscarf. In the audio guide, one red headscarf sighed to another, saying that her health was getting worse and worse...
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You can hear the stories of joy and sorrow of each family in the audio guide, and what defeated me were those ubiquitous details: the meticulously written income and expenses in Teck Cheong Tailor's ledger, the photos of former residents in the frames on the wall, the half-washed dishes in the kitchen, the cockroaches crawling in the corners of the walls... So many details, so many touches, and they are all real history. They are based on the memories of the actual residents at the time and the photos and items provided by their descendants, and have been restored into such a museum. These ordinary and trivial real details have defeated many other noble and alienating museums, and I sincerely hope that all original museums can roll up to this standard.
Visited on May 6, 2016
Chinatown is Singapore's Chinese street, and it is also a place where Singapore tourism will go to check in. Chinatown is very lively. The various snacks are very rich and varied. It is worth visiting, take a look, try snacks, buy crafts, etc. There is also a Chinatown original appearance hall. You can learn more about the history and culture of this region and explore the life of Singapore's earliest Chinese immigrants. The night market is a bit like a Chinese temple fair.
Chinatown is the earliest place where Chinese people arrived in Singapore. It used to be the place where Chinese people lived, but now it has become a sightseeing area. Chinatown’s original appearance museum shows us the past of Chinatown very well, it is worth visiting.
Chinatown original appearance museum is also a very commemorative place, here you can feel a lot of strong atmosphere, Chinatown is also a very good place to visit, the construction area of the whole area is also quite huge.
At the entrance of Niuche Shuiyuan Museum, there is a figure sculpture of "Red Headscarf" and a pair of huge wooden clogs. These two things vividly tell visitors that the ancestors from Lingnan of China are introduced here. When you enter the room, you can buy 15 NT/person tickets in cash at the service desk. The tickets contain the use of guides. Therefore, in the introduction of Chinese explanations, you can stroll in this three-storey building, which occupies a small area. First of all, we visited the scene of the tailor on the first floor. Besides the tailor's shop and clothing store, we also visited the living place of the tailor. Singaporeans are really admired for their care in this respect. All the scenes are arranged according to the original situation, so it is a bit of a historical experience. Rules, brushes, fabrics, scissors and even record books on the operating table all seem to be in use, but the wall calendar tells people that it was more than half a century ago. Although there are not many visitors in the original appearance hall, there are a continuous stream of visitors. Besides Chinese, there are also tourists from Europe and the United States. It's a aftertaste for us and a novelty for them. The most interesting one is a preschool child, also has the earphone which wears the guider in the model, listens to the introduction very earnestly in the library and watches the physical object. Walking up to the second floor, we can see that there are many people of different identities living in the very narrow house, which is more simple and dense than the tube tower. People living here have three-wheelers, carpenters, mobile vendors and other people belonging to the lower strata of society. Seeing such poor living conditions, one can imagine how low the status of Chinese people in Singapore in the lower Nanyang in the nineteenth century is. Here we know the term "red headscarf" which refers to women who work in docks, factories or construction sites. We also know the name "Majie", they are from Shunde, Guangdong Province, who work as domestic servants for the rich "women who comb their heads without marrying". There is also a doctor's room on this floor. As an intellectual, his family's living standard is obviously different from that of the working people. But the price list at his door also marked "the poor are exempt" and the traditional Chinese way of helping the poor came across the sea to Singapore, a strange land. On the third floor of the Museum, there are many historical photographs and cultural relics to show all aspects of the overseas Chinese's life in the South China Sea. These photographs enable us to know more about the Chinese's life in Singapore at that time. From the inheritance of these historical records and the continuation of traditional culture, we can see a connotative force of the Chinese nation. Unexpectedly, in Singapore, the first day of sightseeing gave us a traditional culture and patriotism education lesson. Returning to the first floor exit of the original appearance hall, there is a huge contrast between old and new pictures of the buffalo cart water on the wall, as well as the introduction of many enthusiastic participants in the protection of the original appearance of the buffalo cart water. Any inheritance of history can not be separated from people, but also from people's vision.
Must visit when in Chinatown. Documents the history of Chinatown with lots of historical items to view.
it’s a interesting place
When I went there, the interior was not open for decoration. I looked around. There were so many people. Hindu Temple doorway shoes piled up to the road, the Buddha's teeth Temple all kinds of brilliant gold! When we went out, we had Hainan chicken rice with Grandpa Lu Xue and went to Maxwell every day. The line was a little scary.
Restored the history of early Singaporeans down Nanyang, bilingual introduction in Chinese and English,