Busy Town - ChinaTown

I guess there's nobody who don't know where Chinatown is. Hopefully everyone have been there at least once! It's a pretty nice place to walk around, admire the scenery and take photos of.

One thing I absolutely love about Chinatown is the beautiful, red, GIGANTIC temple! It's so humongous I couldn't believe it's a temple at first sight! I went in and was intrigued by how gorgeous it is. Red and golden everywhere. My favourite colors.

Second thing I love is the Trengganu Street! All the shops there Are so... red. I guess when you ask me about Chinatown, the first thing I thought of will be all the red colors. Striking color. But besides that, all those shophouses are really interesting to look at; even though they've become such tourists' places, more about that later.

Actually I think the reason they're so red to me is because of those umbrellas! Almost all the shops have these red and yellow umbrellas so as to extend their shop areas. Hence, the street become smaller and more narrow. They're walkable, but gonna be super compact when it's Chinese New Year!

So back to the shophouses, they have nice designs, yet not as chinese-y as I thought it would be. As it's 'Chinatown', I thought every designs will be about lions and phoenixes and tigers and all. But no, that wasn't the case. Like the drawing I did above, the designs of the shophouses on the left were shockingly more English than Chinese!

After researching, through wikipedia of course, I found out that most of their shophouses combined elements of baroque and Victorian architecture. Ah! Victorian! No wonder! Maybe that's how Singlish is born? There was already a mix of english and chinese back then!

I would have put Trengganu Street as my first love if only the shops there aren't so tourist oriented! Everywhere I walked, every shops I visited are all selling the same old things. The same old things that cost $10 for any 3 items. Merlions, singapore statues keychains, bells, etc.


It feels as if it's no longer our streets. Everything are for the tourists now.

So I guess we should all quickly visit Chinatown before it's been totally conquered by the tourists. Before everything is lost T_T 

Betty Chum

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