Chinatown is one of those neighbourhoods that packs the soul of a whole city into a few blocks. It began when Stamford Raffles set this area aside for Chinese immigrants in his 1822 town plan, and for generations it was the cramped, bustling home of the coolies and traders who arrived from southern China looking for a better life. Today its colourfully painted restored shophouses, temples, street markets and hawker centres make it one of the most photogenic, delicious and history-rich corners of Singapore.
What makes Chinatown fascinating is that it isn't only Chinese: the same block can hold the great Buddhist Buddha Tooth temple, the Sri Mariamman (the city's oldest Hindu temple, its tower crowded with colourful gods) and a historic mosque. Far from being a coincidence, that mix sums up Singapore's multicultural identity, a country where Chinese, Malay, Indian and other communities live side by side. Between the temples, the streets fill with stalls selling souvenirs, medicinal herbs and red lanterns, and above all with food: some of the city's best hawker centres are here, with stalls that have even held a Michelin star.
This guide covers the best of Chinatown: which temples to visit and how, where to eat cheaply and well, which museums help you understand the neighbourhood's past, and how to get around. It's an essential stop on any trip to Singapore, and one of the richest ways to get a glimpse of the history of Chinese immigration that, to a large extent, built the city-state we know today.
Chinatown was born from the town plan Stamford Raffles drew up around 1822, which divided the colonial city into zones for its different communities: Chinese immigrants were given the southwest bank of the Singapore River. From then on, and throughout the 19th century, thousands of immigrants arrived, mostly from southern China (Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, Hakka), and settled here, many of them as 'coolies' or indentured labourers working in extremely harsh conditions and crammed into the narrow shophouses. The neighbourhood was organised around the temples of each home community, clan houses and mutual aid societies. The waterfront, now inland because of land reclamation, was where many of them came ashore. That's why the Thian Hock Keng temple, dedicated to the sea goddess Mazu, was the first place newcomers went to give thanks for surviving the voyage. With 20th-century modernisation, many shophouses fell into disrepair and came close to being demolished, until in the 1980s the area was declared a conservation zone and restored. Today Chinatown is at once a historic neighbourhood, a tourist attraction and a food hub. The full story of Chinese immigration and the birth of Singapore is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Chinatown, Little India, Kampong Glam and Orchard Road: the neighbourhoods where the colonial plan separated each community and where, street by street, you can still read Singapore's melting pot.
Read the history of Ethnic and cultural neighbourhoods →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Chinatown didn't come about by chance; it came from a plan. When the Briton Thomas Stamford Raffles founded the trading post of Singapore in 1819 and declared it a free port, the fishing village became, within a few years, a magnet for immigrants from all over Asia. To bring order to that explosive growth, around 1822 Raffles drew up an urban plan that divided the town into quarters according to each community's origin: the Europeans were given one area, the Indians another, the Malays and Arabs another, and the Chinese, who would soon be the largest group, the southwest bank of the Singapore River. That was the seed of Chinatown.
The decision to separate the communities reflected the colonial mindset of the time, which sought to control and classify the population. But it also acknowledged a reality: immigrants tended to cluster by origin, dialect and trade, looking for mutual support in a foreign land. So from the very beginning Chinatown was organised around the temples, clan houses and mutual aid societies of each Chinese dialect group: Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, Hakka and Hainanese, each with its own streets, its own gods and its own specialities.
Interestingly, the Chinese called the area 'Niu Che Shui' ('bullock cart water'), because drinking water was carried in on carts pulled by oxen. The name 'Chinatown' is the English colonial label. So from the start, the neighbourhood was Chinese in its population and colonial in its design, a mix that would shape its whole history.
Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, hundreds of thousands of Chinese immigrants arrived in Singapore fleeing the poverty, famines and wars of southern China. Many came as 'coolies', contract labourers who travelled in appalling conditions, packed into ships' holds, and who arrived in debt to whoever had paid their passage. In Singapore they worked unloading goods on the river docks, pulling rickshaws, on building sites or on plantations: gruelling days in the heat for a pittance.
Life in Chinatown was extremely hard. Whole families and groups of single men crammed into the narrow shophouses, in windowless cubicles divided by partitions, sharing kitchens and latrines. Opium dens (the drug was legal and widespread at the time), gambling and prostitution were everywhere (many women were brought over by deception or sold), as were the 'secret societies', Chinese gangs that controlled neighbourhoods and trades and fought violent turf wars.
In the middle of all that hardship, the communities organised themselves to survive: they set up 'kongsi' (clan and dialect associations), temples, hospitals and schools that gave their people support, shelter, work and a decent burial. Today, the Chinatown Heritage Centre recreates that everyday life in raw detail. Behind the pretty restored façades that tourists photograph, there were generations of immigrants who wore themselves out building, brick by brick, the prosperous city of today.
Religion was what held those immigrant communities together, which is why Chinatown is full of temples, each with its own story. The most significant is Thian Hock Keng, the oldest Chinese temple in the city, built by the Hokkien community in the 1840s on Telok Ayer Street. Today that street lies inland, but originally it faced straight onto the sea: it was the shoreline where immigrants came ashore. That's why the temple is dedicated to Mazu, the goddess of the sea, and it was the first place newcomers went to give thanks for surviving the voyage.
The neighbourhood's diversity shows in the fact that, just a few metres from the Chinese temples, there are places of worship of other religions. Sri Mariamman, founded in 1827, is Singapore's oldest Hindu temple, with its 'gopuram' tower covered in colourful deities. Nearby, on Telok Ayer, are the Al-Abrar Mosque and Nagore Dargah, a shrine of the South Indian Muslim community. That Hindus, Muslims and Chinese of different faiths prayed a few metres from one another, right in the middle of Chinatown, says a lot about the multicultural Singapore that was taking shape.
In the 21st century came the monumental Buddha Tooth Relic Temple, opened in 2007 in Tang style, which keeps what is venerated as a tooth of the Buddha in a golden stupa. Together, Chinatown's temples make up a unique spiritual map, where faith was at once comfort, identity and a support network for people who had left everything behind.
The 20th century hit Chinatown hard. During the Japanese occupation (1942-1945), Singapore's Chinese community suffered especially: the Sook Ching operation, in which Japanese forces executed thousands of Chinese civilians suspected of resistance, left a deep wound in the neighbourhood, which had been a hub of support for China against the Japanese invasion of their homeland.
After the war and independence in 1965, the new Singaporean state set out on rapid modernisation. Many residents of Chinatown's overcrowded shophouses were rehoused in the new, modern public housing blocks the government was building all over the island, with better living conditions. It was a huge social step forward, but it emptied the neighbourhood of much of its original population and its traditional street life. The old, run-down shophouses were left in limbo, and for a while there were serious plans to demolish them and put up modern towers, as happened in so many other areas.
In the 1980s, however, another idea won out: conservation. The government declared Chinatown a conservation area and set about restoring its shophouses and temples, recognising their historical and tourist value. The colourful façades, eaves, shutters and ornamental details were brought back, and the neighbourhood reinvented itself as a cultural and food destination. A unique heritage was saved, though at the cost of turning much of the neighbourhood into a showcase for visitors rather than a place of everyday life.
Today's Chinatown is a neighbourhood of fascinating contrasts. On a single block you'll find century-old temples and trendy cocktail bars, Chinese herbal medicine stalls and specialty coffee shops, hawker centres with S$4 dishes that hold a Michelin star, and the glass towers of the financial district peeking over the rooftops. It's at once a living museum of Chinese immigration, one of Singapore's great food meccas and a fashionable area for a night out.
The Chinese community is now the majority in Singapore (around three quarters of the population), but few still live in Chinatown: the neighbourhood is more a symbol and a destination than a place where large numbers of people live. Even so, it keeps a lively life of its own in its active temples, its markets, its clan houses and, above all, its hawker centres, where generations of cooks keep traditional flavours alive. Every Chinese New Year, the neighbourhood bursts into red and gold decorations and becomes the centre of the whole city's celebrations.
Exploring Chinatown is, at heart, exploring the foundations of Singapore. This is where the immigrants arrived, suffered and prospered, and whose work made today's prosperous city-state possible. Behind every colourful façade there's a story of voyages, sacrifice and community. Eating a plate of chicken rice at Maxwell, lighting incense at Thian Hock Keng or looking into the tiny rooms of the Heritage Centre is a glimpse into that story: the story of ordinary people who, without knowing it, built one of the richest cities on the planet.
