CHIJMES

This guide to CHIJMES in Singapore starts at the Gate of Hope, the small iron door where families once left infants for the French nuns of the Sisters of the Holy Infant Jesus to find at dawn. It follows Mother Saint Mathilde's 1854 convent and orphanage from its founding through the social beliefs that brought so many girls to that gate, including the case of a Straits Times story about a baby named Rosa in 1950. Along the way it traces the Gothic chapel's consecration and the decades that turned this convent into the courtyard you're standing in now.