Chinatown Heritage Centre

Hundred of restaurants in there. All looks good I had crispy pork with rice , sooo yummy

The colourful past of Chinatown comes alive within the walls of these three beautifully-restored shophouses on Pagoda Street, comfortably nestled in the midst of Singapore's bustling Chinatown district. Every nook and cranny in the Chinatown Heritage Centre pulsates with the memories of yesteryear, offering an experience like no other as one is transported to Chinatown in the budding years of Singapore's establishment as a seaport. From the desperate hopefulness of the many "Sinkheh" (new migrants) - risking life and limb to embark on an arduous journey from the various Chinese provinces to the promised land of Singapore - to the raw, seedy and underground practices of gambling dens and secret societies, be prepared to experience a sense of nostalgia and sentimentality as you step into the pages of Chinatown's history. The Chinatown Heritage Centre is the only place in Singapore that has recreated the original interiors of its shophouse tenants in the 1950s, offering visitors an honest, revealing glimpse into the lives of Chinatown's early residents.

Brought students here for learning journey and was pleasantly surprised by the renovated museum. I am particularly impressed by the display of sleeping quarters of people working different jobs in the early days. Much effort has been devoted to replicate the living environment of our forefathers who earned a hard living doing various odd jobs. The admission ticket is not cheap but it is not going to be a disappointment. I think it is worth a visit.

Nice place to visit and buy souvenirs

Such a wonderful place to visit that it shows the old Chinese culture and the way of living at that time. Many things to see and learn from the history. Located at Pagoda Street Chinatown that it is very easy to reach this place. Go to exit A from the Chinatown MRT Station. It is surrounded by gift shops, souvenir shops, and restaurants.

It is in a very convenient and tourist spot so we decided have a dinner here. The food seemed ok, nothing special but not bad either. The problem is that both me and my girlfriend got food poisoning diarrhea and vomits in the next hours. This restaurant is the only thing we did the same,the timing fits and is the obvious cause. It ruined our short stay in Singapore. Maybe a better idea is to spend a little more for a 4.5 stars rating restaurant so as to minimize the risk to loose your precious days for an expensive trip like this!!

Excellent experience. Interesting storyline. Well describe with self-guided audio tour. Takes about 1-2 hours to see/feel the museum and listen to the whole story. The museum consists 3-story building.

This museum is surely interesting for everyone. You can follow the first Chinese immigrants how they moved from China , where they arrived , the conditions in which they had to live and the difficulties had to face. They all had to work extremely hard (sometimes as slaves) in order to survive and build up a future for their families. Really admirable what they did.

Step back in time at Singapore's Chinatown Heritage Centre. Located in three restored shophouses on Pagoda Street, this was a nice place to start learning about Singapore's history. Cheyenne from Indie Singapore Tours used this Centre to start the discussion about Chinatown. Traders. Immigrants. Laborers. Why people left their homes in China for a better life escaping famine, floods and civil unrest. How much they were paid. Where they lived. Who made the trip successfully on the ships. Who succumbed to illness and died on the journey. How many men and women lived in a house. Interesting to learn about the Samsui women who wore trademark red head scarfs as they worked. They arrived in Singapore in the 1930s and worked in the construction industry. There were immigration limited on male immigrants, but no restrictions on women immigrants which allowed more women to immigrate to Singapore. It often took the women decades to pay off their debt to immigrate. The red headdress was worn as a way to prevent accidents and to carry their belongings. A great Centre to learn about the history of Singapore's Chinatown.

This is currently closed for renovation and will re-open in the second half of 2015. My review is based on my previous visits and I hope the place will be even better after the renovation. I love this place for its way of bringing history to life. I have been here several times as I will usually bring visitors here or recommended them to take a look if they have time. Chinatown is not a place I visited as a child so this place is a great resource in learning more about the lives of the early Chinese immigrants and also to know the layout of a typical shophouse in Chinatown. Most people will never get the chance to explore a shophouse and its nooks and crannies. I never realized how long a shophouse is and that there is an airwell in the middle for ventilation. Or how the many cubicles on the upper levels actually housed many families. A family of 4 or 6 or more would actually live in a cubicle. How they lived then I had no idea, with today's concept of personal space. Besides the living conditions and various Chinese cuisines the Chinese immigrants brought to old Singapore, I also learnt more about the traditional Chinese culture and the opium and gambling dens as well as the work they did. It was just a very educational place but done in such a way that it was not boring at all. I am looking forward to the re-opening next year.

We had some time to kill and I suggested that we should check out the Chinatown Heritage Centre, located near the hotel we were staying out. It turned out to be much more than I expected. I love the way the Centre utilizes the shophouse building to bring to life the stories of the Chinese immigrants who lived in these types of accommodations in the past. The thorough and engaging audio tour highlighted the struggles, hopes, and joy of everyday life. The second half of Chinatown Heritage Centre is designed more like a traditional museum with exhibits on relevant topics. I loved this section equally as much. Our visit enriched our understanding of Singapore's history and I highly recommend any visitor (or resident) of Singapore make the time to stop by.

Chinatown Heritage Centre is located right inside Chinatown. When I walked into the museum itself, I thought it is a store selling deco and keepsakes. I do like how the museum itself preserves and shows the tenants used to occupied the building including tailor, hawker, coolies, samsui women and people of different trades. There is also a restaurant, Singapore Heritage Restaurant on the premise if you want to try out famous Singapore dishes with a twist. Admission is $10. Great if you want to see how the life of early Chinese in Singapore were.

Well worth a visit. It's inexpensive and a cool way to get a feel for what things were like before Singapore turned in to an Asian megacity. The provided audio guide is nice, if not a little long (I was ready to move on from some items before it was done talking) and covers the first and second floors, which recreate a Chinatown shophouse. The third floor is much more dense, covering other portions of Chinatown history and nearby points of interest - supposedly the guide is being extended to cover the third floor, but that's going to take a lot of work. The museum staff was very helpful as well, recommending the nearest hawker center - "don't eat at street level, that's where tourists eat." Worth remembering.

One of the best museums I have visited in Singapore. It's very interesting, maybe because I'm of Chinese descent as well. Although I came from Indonesia and not Singapore, I could imagine that the living condition for the newly arrived immigrants from China was equally hard. Here you would be taken back to the time back in the early 1900s when the first waves of immigrants come from China and had to take hard labours and live in inhumane quarters as you would see in the museum. With the audio guide, it would feel like you relived the past as you walked through the exhibition in the museum. It's a must visit when you're in Chinatown.

Have not expected this place to be so great. Didn't look so interesting from the outside. But what a nice surprise. This place is definitely where you have to start exploring the China town. So interesting to see how people lived, actually be able to see how their homes looked like from inside. unforgettable experience.

This was an unexpectedly amazing experience. Very well done museum to bring alive history. Engaging and educational.

Omg I loved this place. I'm not sure when it opened, but I wish I had known about to sooner. So my mother was born and grew up in Singapore Chinatown in the 50s and 60s, which is the time period this museum covers. I had been to Chinatown a few times before, and my mom always pointed out the different shophouses where she had lived. Yeah the place looked dirty and rundown, but I really had no idea what things were really like until I visited this center. It's set up like a preserved shop house with an audio tour that describes the living quarters and the lives of the people who lived there (from what I can tell, the stories are about actual people and families who lived in Chinatown during this era). I have to say, this center really gives you a feel for how difficult life was and how little these people had. My mother had described to me living in a single room with her parents and four siblings and that they shared a house with different families. I always pictured a small studio apartment with a shared kitchen, kind of like a dorm. I was shocked to see the reality of the environment. There weren't rooms; there were cubicles that were offered privacy only by curtains and no doors. What immediately struck me was how small these cubicles were; about the size of my office at work right now (maybe around 8 ft x 8 ft). Imagine a family of 7 or 8 sharing this room along with all their possessions. The "beds" were hard wooden tables with straw mats on top. The shared kitchen was the size of my kitchen right now (which I think is too small) and had an outhouse toilet and shower at the back of it. Any by kitchen, I mean a narrow room with cement counters on either side where each family could place their portable stove (stove kind of a deceiving term now, since the stoves were basically stone cylinders that housed wood fires. It was really eye opening to me to understand how my mom actually lived and grew up. The audio tour also did an excellent job at explaining the history of Chinatown, where people came from and why, and how they ended up living in these unfathomably tiny and uncomfortable quarters. A very intimate and compelling portrait of history.