Quietly tucked away in a corner surrounded by high-rise apartments and rows of bungalows is a rustic village where the old Singapore still survives.
Dogs and cats run freely and chickens cluck noisily as children play around colorful, zinc-roofed houses made of wood and cement, undisturbed by the din of cars zipping by on an expressway just a few meters away.
Welcome to Kampong Lorong Buangkok, the last surviving village on the Singapore mainland.
Photo: AFP
Its days are numbered, but until development forces residents to move, the village gives visitors a glimpse of what life was like in the 1950s before Singapore became one of Asia’s most modern and wealthiest cities.
Occupying a land area the size of three soccer pitches in the northeastern suburbs, the kampong (“village” in the Malay language) has 28 houses scattered haphazardly with a total of about 50 residents.
With unpaved streets, large backyard gardens, grassy patches and occasional banana plants, the cluster is an anachronism in a city-state crammed with office towers, high-rise apartment blocks and shopping malls.
For residents, the village provides relief at the end of each working day, a quiet oasis where neighbors still know each other intimately, quite unlike the anonymity of city living.
“I have a deep attachment to my neighbors,” said Sng Mui Hong, a 57-year-old spinster who rents out houses in the village for S$6.50 to S$30 (US$5 to US$23) a month.
Most of Singapore’s 5 million residents live in government-built apartment buildings and private condominiums.
“After all they grew up with me, and some of the grandmothers and grandfathers here have watched me grow up,” said Sng, who currently lives with a nephew and niece, three dogs and several pet birds.
Her family moved into the plot of land in 1956, when Singapore was still under British colonial rule. Electricity and running water came into the village in 1962, a period when the country was in political transition.
Singapore, a largely ethnic Chinese island, became part of the Federation of Malaysia in 1963, but was expelled two years later as Kuala Lumpur pursued policies favorable to the Malay majority.
In modern-day Kampong Lorong Buangkok, racial harmony comes naturally for the Chinese and Malay families whose houses are about 5m apart.
“They are like my own parents because we are from the same village. So I don’t care if they are Malay or Chinese,” Sng said of her older neighbors.
And while the village is by Singapore standards far from supermarkets, schools and bus and train stops, residents rarely mind as there are perks to village life that cannot be found elsewhere.
Some even own cars, a luxury in Singapore.
Makeup artist Jamil Kamsah, who has lived in Kampong Lorong Buangkok since 1967, enjoys the amicable nature of the village folk.
“People here are very friendly, motherly and polite, and it is easy for me to make friends with them,” the 55-year-old said. “I don’t scold animals and I talk to plants.”
In his free time, Jamil tends to his garden and touches up the exterior of his house, welcoming visitors with a ready smile.
In land-scarce Singapore, where many older buildings and residential areas have been converted to more modern housing or commercial use, Kampong Lorong Buangkok faces an uncertain future. Sng hopes the village can be preserved to educate future generations about the past and show them how their forefathers lived.
“Not everybody started off wealthy, many grandfathers built their lives from scratch,” she said
Some city schools take their young students on excursion trips to Kampong Lorong Buangkok to learn about village life.
“Some children mistook the chickens for birds,” Kamsah said.
The village’s days are numbered, and the residents know it.
Singapore’s land-use planning agency, the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA), said there are plans to redevelop Kampong Lorong Buangkok, but gave no time frame.
“The kampong at Lorong Buangkok and its surrounding land is planned to be comprehensively developed to provide future housing and other neighborhood facilities supported by a road network,” a URA spokesperson said.
Sng, however, does not feel sad even if her village has to go one day.
“Nothing lasts forever,” she said with a shrug.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS