The whole thing started many, many years ago, when URA let out
the 'Thong Chai' Medical Institution located along Eu Tong Sen
street to night club operator, which transformed that medically and
spiritually holy monument into one [email protected] of a decadent school.
Hordes of opposing voices arose from four corners of Singapore,
when Singaporeans heard that the vey building that had housed
great, charitable physicians who took a huge part of their lives
out for the dedication to services of free medical treatments for
sick and poor Chinese immigrants in our early pre-war days of the
nineteenth century was turned into a free-flowing of booze and
late-night sex.
Ohh...so after a round or two of opposition and interaction, the
relevant authority finally did the right thing by taking the
licence off from the poor building, and now it has become a...what?
Sales company selling 'living products'. By then, damage was
already done to this rare monument of Southern Chinese secular
architecture.
One look at our current historical and cultural monuments and even
the blind will be able to tell that URA and whichever relevant
department know NUTS about preservation. All they care is one
thing: '$', i.e. how to make money out of these old, almost useless
pre-war buildings...?
"Tear them down, Singaporeans will make noise. Leave them to rot,
Singaporeans complain. Convert them into something else,
Singaporeans moan. So in the end, we will just 'retain' the
building and re-cycle the name".
Thus we we see what is being made of right now, where Lau Pat Sa is
NOT 'the' old market Singaporeans know of, Chinatown has become a
dunno-what place selling dunno-what items, Old Thong Chai Medical
Hall has changed into a faceless building, and Boat Quay shophouses
just became rows and rows of memory-lost lanes with no trace
whatsoever of our past water-dependant 'coolies' and commercial
trades.
What is left are just bronze plates nailed on walls of these
locations, carrying paragraphs of our past, and letting some
heart-felt tourists who happened to walk past and catch a tale or
two of our shimmering history. As for the rest, they would not so
much into what the place was once, and has been now; they would be
much more interested in knowing which is the best place to sing,
dance, drink and get high, indeed the very ones URA wishes to have
and see. Money does spin and makes the world go round and
round.
