Chinatown Heritage Centre

About this audio guide

Step into a recreated nineteen-fifties shophouse on Pagoda Street, where families from Fujian and Guangdong were packed into cubicle rooms partitioned by thin wooden boards. The guide follows the samsui women who crossed alone from Guangdong for construction work, wore red headscarves as a badge of their province, and sent money home for decades, alongside neighbours like a clog maker, a hawker, and a physician whose cubicle had a peephole in the floor. It also climbs to the upper galleries, where the story turns toward the quarter's less virtuous corners.