Kampung BlogThe last village of Singapore
If you are a food lover, you might think of Verdun Road in Little India when you think of Singapore. If you are a tree hugger, you might think of Bukit Timah Nature Reserve. A student of Lasalle College of the Arts might be thinking thoughts random as study loan Singapore.
But if you are a drama addict, you might remember this 20-episode Singaporean Chinese drama titled “Beyond” which made its debut in 2012, with Jeanette Aw and Li Nan Xing unravelling mysteries of the realm of unknown and unexplained. You might remember Episode 10, titled “The Queer Smile of the Moon”, where Jiang Wei the private detective and his team were lost in Kampong Minpi and had to spend a night in the village. When they woke up, one of them was gone.
Some scenes of Kampong Minpi were filmed in Kampong Buangkok, a quaint little village found in mainland Singapore, tucked away in a vast expanse of green at Yio Chu Kang and bordered by the canalised remains of upper Sungei Punggol on its western front.
The village was known as Selak Kain in Malay, which meant “hitching up one’s skirt”, as people raise their sarongs to wade through floods. Kampong Buangkok was always hit by floods. When heavy rains coincided with high tides, flash floods ensued in low lying areas. The water level in drains and canals became so high that the water could not be drained off quickly enough, prompting floods to occur. A canal was built at Gerald Drive in an endeavor to curtail or absolve the floods in 1970 but it failed in the face of mighty floods. Currently, the area is still affected by floods, the most recent being in 2006. There was a $10 million personal assistant to ameliorate the drainage system and to raise the ground level but it was discontinued for being cost ineffective.
The land which the kampong rests on was acquired in 1956 from Huang Yu Tu by Sng Teow Koon, a traditional Chinese medicine seller. At the time of sale and purchase, there were already up to 6 houses built on the land. Sng Teow Koon and his family settled down in the village and started renting out land to others to build homes. When he passed away, his children inherited the land. One of his his children, Sng Mui Hong, continued to live in the village with her nieces while her other siblings have gotten married and moved out, and she is currently the landlady of the village.
Life in Kampong Buangkok demonstrated a strong social solidarity among its villagers, who would meet up with neighbours and friends to engage in leisurely activities, such as drinking tea and playing Chinese chess. There was an acceptance and tolerance of racial differences, as villagers of Kampong Buangkok would send food to each other during Hari Raya, cookies during Chinese New Year and exchange presents during festive seasons.
During the 1960s racial rampage, Kampong Buangkok was a village that did not divide among racial lines. At a testing time where the Chinese and Malays fought, wounded and killed each other out of deep mistrust, the Chinese of Kampong Buangkok approached their Malay neighbours to tell them that there shall be no tension between them.
As the city of Lions went through modernization and development, land from the village was re-assigned for other projects. All that is left of the village is just a small area of about two soccer fields.
And, who knows? Some day, this little piece of land that taught us what social harmony is may be gone, too.
Leave a Reply