I have actually started out from the Pinnacle@Duxton building, on the corner of Chinatown where South Bridge Road starts.
These first pictures are just doors and houses of Chinatown.
And a few back alleys.
This is Buddha Tooth Relic Temple.
But this time, it is festive!
It wasn't just me playing tourist!
The shopping streets in Chinatown. On Thursday it was still extremely busy, with all the goodies for CNY. Then on Friday it was completely empty - well not of tourists.
Ann Siang Hill (安详山) and Ann Siang Road. It is named after Chia Ann Siang, a wealthy Hokkien trader in the second half of the 19th century. He acquired the hill (and the neighboring Mount Erskine), which then was called Gemmill's Hill after a British merchant, and before that Scott's Hill, after Charles Scott a spice trader, who has used the hills as nutmeg and clove plantations. The early
Chinese immigrants visited Ann Siang Hill for the remittance houses, letter writers and calligraphers who had shops there to help the illiterate immigrants send money and letters home. This is the only hill remaining of all neighboring ones, which where razed.
The back alley theme continued from the hill.
While in Little India the air is always fragrant, either with spices or with incense, in Chinatown I have usually not smelled much, other than perhaps trash :( But on Friday (again, the 1st day of CNY) the air in the heart of Chinatown was full of simple or fragrant smoke. The simple smoke was Chinese people burning paper, bunches of red, special sheets of paper. I don't know its significance, but I have seen many large furnaces at different parts of Chinatown, and I have also seen ashes of burnt paper all over the place in the streets.
And then of course there was the burning of joss sticks. Joss sticks are a type of incense, they look like sparklers (csillagszóró), and are traditionally burned in front of Asian religious images or in shrines. They are also usually small :)
I haven't actually seen a lot of celebration. Dragon dance, etc. must have been in the evening. But the decorations were still up in the empty streets :)
Btw most of these pictures are from South Bridge Road, and sometimes you can see the Pinnacle building at the end of it.
I have seen this car in the administrative district (already on North Bridge Road). What this is is a car that is operated by Dragon Dance companies. And during the day it would cruise around and they would play Chinese music - or at least make noise with Chinese drums :) I have also seen this in operation, but wasn't fast enough to take a picture of it...
Notice the little marker showing that we are in Chinatown!
The Telok Ayer area.
Other temples, mosques, religious sites on CNY.
This is a Chinese Theatre, live, across from Thian Hock Keng Temple.
