Difficult Beginnings: Singapore Remembers Its Painful Past

SINGAPORE, Feb. 14, 2008 — -- Dark, dirty and cramped. It's a far cry from what visitors today know about the tiny nation-state of Singapore.

But this was life in Singapore's Chinatown only decades ago, and tourists looking for a slice of authentic history would be well advised to visit the Chinatown Heritage Centre.

Built five years ago and located in the heart of Chinatown, the museum occupies three restored shophouses on bustling Pagoda Street.

Why shophouses? Because that was where the first crop of Chinese immigrants to Singapore lived -- in dark, windowless cubicles, often shared by as many as 10 people.

They had risked their lives fleeing China in search of what they hoped would be a better future in Singapore.

Packed into wooden boats, or Chinese junks, these brave but desperate men and women took to the seas for a journey that could take weeks or months, depending on the monsoon.

Many fell sick amid the cramped, unsanitary conditions, and many were thrown overboard since there were few means of treating the sick en-route to Singapore.

One of the first things these early settlers would do upon reaching their new home would be to give thanks to the Taoist sea-goddess, Ma Zu, the guardian of seafarers and fishermen. The oldest Chinese temple in Singapore, Thian Hock Keng, was built in the early 19th century to do just that.

Not suprisingly, most immigrants had carried very little with them -- an umbrella, two sets of clothes and those few possessions deemed too precious to leave behind.

The small proportion of skilled immigrants brought a little more -- a tailor's small, battered case, holding some cloth, a ruler and a wooden pillow, or an accountant's box, with his trusted abacus and a pair of worn-out shoes.