Discover another side to Singapore’s famous Orchard Road as new heritage trail holds clue to its past.
GRACE OO!
Orchard Road, ¢.1900.
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YMCA, 1910s. Indian dhobies washing laundry in stream, 1890. Former headquarters of Salvation Army at the House of Tan Yeok Nee, c.1980s. Cairnhill
Prior to its transformation into bustling shopping district, the Orchard area was valley flanked by the hills of Emerald and Cairnhill amongst others. It provided fertile land for plantations and orchards growing economic crops such as nutmeg and housed cemetery grounds to bury the departed. Many Singaporeans may not know much about the many different aspects of the area’s history. However, the Orchard Heritage Trail is set to change that. The new Orchard Heritage Trail is the 18th heritage trail by Singapore’s National Heritage Board (NHB). It charts Orchard’s metamorphosis into the heart of Singapore’s tourism and retail scene, through its long-standing iconic landmarks, and tales of the communities that lived and worked there over the years. In fact, many firsts for Singapore happened in the Orchard area, including first supermarket, Cold Storage, which remains at its original location at Centrepoint Shopping Centre, and also the first public swimming pool by YMCA at Fort Canning.
The trail also includes six National Monuments and UNESCO World Heritage Site. As with all of NHB’s heritage trails, the Orchard Heritage Trail is self-guided trail which 71 heritage sites that dot the Orchard area spanning from Dhoby Ghaut to Tanglin. The trail features 10 trail markers (six of which have been installed, with four more to be installed over time), which provide fascinating insights into Orchard Road’s history, and lesser known facts about the precinct. The trail covers various landmarks, such as former residences of early pioneers such as Lim Boon Keng and Tan Yeok Nee who left an indelible mark on the development of the area, and the places of worship that were built as different communities flourished in the area, It also feature the stories of various communities including the Chinese, Malay, Indians and Jews settled in the Orchard Road area during the 1800s. Some notable community groups included the Indian washermen (or dhobies) after
Source: MUHIBAH, the Royal Brunei Airlines in-flight magazine, 2018 Nov-Dec, pages 32-36. Text recovered from the scanned page by OCR and lightly corrected; spelling may differ from the printed edition.
