The charms of Chinatown

For all the efforts of the tourism board to turn Chinatown into a sanitised haven for family-friendly activities, the neighbourhood’s traditional pursuits continue to stake a claim, be it in bold shopfronts or more discreet backdoors that lead to parlours of pleasure. As they browse through dozens of look-alike stores peddling plastic souvenirs and exotic mockeries of Oriental charm, most tourists are likely to miss a faded plague at the South Bridge side of Smith Street, which recaps tragic anecdotes and leaps of desperation from the long lost life of this lane as a den of vice.

Together with nearby Sago Street, Trengganu Street and a few other alleys that no longer exist, Smith Street formed the core of a thriving district of Chinese and Japanese brothels from the turn of the 20th century till the 1930s. A little further down, Spring Street and Banda Street were known in Cantonese as phan tsai mei or ‘lane of foreign prostitutes’. Survivors from an earlier age still refer to Spring Street as yap pun kai. Three-storey high restaurants lit by gaslight from roof to floor stood shoulder to shoulder with the Smith Street brothels. “No area in Singapore can compare with ‘Greater Town’, noted a contemporary observer of the old city. “There is an area known as Kereta Ayer in ‘Greater Town’ where restaurants, theatres and brothels are concentrated. It is the most populated area where filth and dirt are hidden. No place in Singapore can compare with it… brothels are as many and as close together as the teeth of a comb.”

The brothels along Smith Street were, by the standards of the profession, high class establishments that catered to respectable citizens such as teachers, clerks and merchants. These loh kui chai would advertise with black signboards bearing names like “so and so Lau” or “so and so Heung”. These two names reliably indicated the nature of the services rendered, which typically included an overnight session behind windows with ornate bas-reliefs. In other lanes that served the unwashed masses, the experience was said to be nasty, brutish and short and the ladies affectionately and perhaps appropriately termed pau po or firecracker dames.

Now mere husks that house trades of more savoury credence, these densely built blocks still stand in the shadow of highrise flats and skyscraping banks. But little remains of their soul save a remnant colony of ah peks who gather at Sago Street to smoke and bemoan their youth. In their little corner behind the glorious halls of an unquestionable authority, the men with white hair and wrinkled skin exchange tales in dialect and counter the assault of progress with moves on a chequered board. But soon they will be gone and their stubborn holdout relinquished and reborn in a form that would resonate with those who like their towns to be hot. As ever, the city that has no time to think and less to remember remains truer to those who call it a hub than those who call it home.

Reference: James Francis Warren, Ah Ku and Karayuki-san: Prostitution in Singapore 1870-1940, Singapore University Press, 2003.