The Chinatown Heritage Centre is the
gateway for all visitors to explore Chinatown.
Located at Pagoda Street, the Heritage
Centre is the only place in Singapore that has kept their original interiors of
its shophouse since 1950s.
By visiting the museum the visitors get to know and understand the Chinatown’s early residents.
The Chinatown Heritage Centre also shows
the journey of Singapore's early pioneers who left their villages in China, before
the arrival of Sir Thomas Stamford 1819, and made their way
to Nanyang, the southern seas. They were driven by hunger crises, floods
and turmoils, and came to Singapore with the hope of earning a living and
seeking a better life.
The new adventure greeted the Chinese immigrants
(known as sinkeh = new guest in Hokkien dialect). It would have been the first
time seeing someone of another ethnicity (Europeans, Arabs, Indians and so on).
Most of the Chinese immigrants settled south of the Singapore River and created
Chinatown by cultivating gambier and pepper.
Pagoda Street was named after the pagoda-like „gopuram”
of Sri Mariammam Temple, the largest and oldest Hindu temple in Singapore,
located on the South Bridge Road end of the street.
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