Lately I have been sharing several posts about the houses of Telok Blangah; the palaces of the Temenggong , the colonial Black and White houses built for British colonials and their domestic staff , and those built by a Chinese towkay . But of course, the area wasn’t only inhabited by opulent Malay rulers, wealthy colonials and rich Chinese. Like in any neighbourhood, most of the inhabitants of Telok Blangah would have been middle class or not that well-to-do. In this post I zoom in on a...

When we talk about colonial Black and White Houses in Singapore and their inhabitants, we tend to remember the British families that lived in them. In reality a colonial estate would house many others besides the tuans besar and their families, and they can be roughly divided into two categories: domestic staff and company workers. In this post I want to talk about that first group. You can imagine those large houses with all their timber, like the ones I describe in my previous post on...

This is the next post in a series on the history of colonial Black and White Houses of Telok Blangah. The colonial houses in this area were built for expatriate staff working at Keppel Harbour, and the area was first developed by Chinese businessman Ang Seah Im, as we saw in this previous post. I want to show you another colonial estate on the foothills of Mount Faber, which is rather special as it was built as the first corporate estate in Singapore, and in fact predates most of the better...