How Have Singapore's Coastlines Changed Over The Years? | Lost Waterfronts | CNA Documentary

once we had picture-perfect coastlines little hills wide natural bays curvy beachfronts that told a lot of stories they witnessed many many epic battles and visits by vessels of all kinds here were seaside lifestyles simple or palatial all gone now buried under the shifting sands the lost waterfronts in a previous life singapore's coastlines undulated free forms with hills bays and inlets but they had to go forsaken in the search of wealth [Music] we lost our curves and gained a quarter times more mass through a steady diet of sand in various land reclamation projects shape-shifting ability was introduced by the british on the first colonial waterfront at the singapore river [Music] its current stomach shape was engineered 200 years ago streamlined for future growth the first land reclamation was quite explicitly carried out towards economic or commercial ends singapore occupied an ideal situation in terms of its position on the malacca straits but its site was problematic in a number of ways it was a small island it was hilly and undulating it was swampy the first reclamation project aimed at sorting out the problematic future port this map printed a year after the reflection arrival shows the obstacles including a sandbar that would have surely annoyed anyone trying to get across the re-engineering involved destroying some real estate nearby jutting out to sea on a headland was a hill called swarkyatteng top of the tiny hill documents show that 130 houses were built on it and the residents mostly teochew farmers petitioned to stay on no such luck in 1822 the hill was leveled a multi-ethnic team of laborers hacked away at it and used that earth to fill in the mangrove swamp on the south bank of the singapore river to establish solid ground the embankment took shape with room for jetties and go downs this enlarged belly not named bloat key was ready for business and the hill now flattened became a commercial square named commercial square later renamed raffles place [Music] boat key became the waterfront in the early 1800s with the harbour by the river mouth in its cluttered days the river had a distinctive boat culture now lost to us for example the language of the lighter crafts the intermediaries between ships in the open sea and go downs in the narrow key the sampan the dwarko and tonkang were each unique in form and function dong kang had a very long history it actually started off about 20 years ago with the indian who built there was a small tong we call it indian tonkan is another chance is different it's smaller than dong kang the carrying capacity is about forty percent fewer foreign future we call it [Music] the the bow was actually painted green we call it green bao book ching touch one for those gyotee dwago the bow was painted red we call it hong it was dominated by the hokkien so those words that you saw were really clean power back at the middle session crackly today that one is called cha chun tao is dominated by teotihu those boats were painted red then further up at roberson key those boats were painted clean again so you know it was a hokkien territory so cantonese had nowhere to play along singapore river the boats in the early days of the colony had to navigate past the rocky point approximately where the fullerton is today this painting shows rocky point in 1819 as a jungle and was clearly labeled in some early day maps but the rocks hindered traffic flow and had to go which eased logistics but he raised clues to the past like the singapore stone [Music] so singapore stone was discovered june 1819 when some bengalis were tasked to clear off all the trees and russia was growing there right at the mouth of the singapore river and they found a big boulder there which had been split in two artificially which created a nice flat surface and one side it was used to write a long inscription like 50 lines a meter and a half high very long text for this period so nobody could read it and nobody would the stones went the same way as rocky point some fragments however were rescued and sent to calcutta for safekeeping so one of the fragments is back in the national museum now was sent back when the raffles museum was set up here the other two fragments are still in calcutta but no one has seen them in like 100 years many many years later another curiosity was placed roughly where the stone used to be the 70s merlion isn't the machination of a 20th century tourism board its history goes as far back as 1600 sea lions were depicted on the early coat of arms of the east india company when administration of singapore eventually passed on to the crown in the 1860s [Music] by that time boat key was replaced by collier key as the new waterfront now this was a proper frontage a former beach reclaimed in the 1860s it faced the sea and had posh buildings with verandas upon which company peons would be on the lookout for company ships the architectural waterfront that they created was intended to to demonstrate kind of the the power and might of the british empire and to project that power into this part of the world [Music] nothing spelled power more than johnston's peer which protruded from the key it was the empire's come hither complete with a nightly red hue the red oil lamp led to the waterfront's moniker or lampumera a nickname that stuck when clifford pierre took over johnston's role from the 1930s onwards in that era a new waterfront was made out of an epic mistake at telugu [Music] here lies telugu bay early reclamation projects were nips and tucks compared to what happened here the only indication that this used to be a waterfront is on a wall i was inspired by chinese ink paintings like a long scroll starting from the right to the left one of the key scene in the mural is a depiction of telugu bay in the 19th century it was a convenient place for new migrants to land know they built the jost houses and temples so that when they arrive they have a place to pay thanks and for the safe journey and that was actually how the nago dargah shrine and the tin hawking temple first started when i was painting the mural some people walked past and asked me what i was painting so when they saw this scene of the seafront they were very very surprised to many generations who didn't even know that we have lost this shoreline it was a big revelation telugu street echoes the curve of the original shoreline and as for those main thoroughfares nearby they were once water the sea was filled in because of events thousands of miles away once soya's canal opened in 1869 the distance between europe and singapore is so much nearer from three months become one month so it actually makes singapore an important port for the east to meet with the west the increased volume necessitated more infrastructure including a new harbour to be named new harbor now our old harbour at tanjong pagar the go downs however stayed put by the river and transporting goods became complicated the path from point a to b winded around almost irrationally bullet carts the main mode of transport plotted the hilly paths to the go downs standing in the way were hills ambitiously called mounts named after early settlers like wallach and palmer they were perfect vantage points for victorian artists sometime in 1856 percy carpenter walked up mount wallock and painted what would become the most extensive view of singapore of that era looking at the painting by percy carpenter i was fascinated that there was a hill that overlooked the loch is street behind the temple was actually a quite a long reach line on xi'an hill which where the painter first company was standing and then on to bukit palmer [Music] i'm now standing in front of the habit not muslim and the saleh moss you can see they set on the little hill the hill was bukit armor on mount palmer mount palmer one of the taller hills had a height of a 13 storied block of flats from here john turnbull thompson got a very good view of the bay its splendidly wide curve bedecked by cliffs it was an accurate depiction because his job depended on it some people commented he's not very artistic his paintings but i think for his purpose and his intent is very good john turnbull thompson he was the first government surveyor to be appointed to singapore and this part of the straight settlement so surveyors would tend to draw at that time to to sort of use it as a reference back in the office so he had cultivated this hobby of drawing various places wherever it was almost like instagram mount palmer survived through the age of photography but only just shortly it too would be laid low when the time came for the hills to go so ultimately reclamation was used to create a flat relatively smooth coastline stretching from the singapore river to new harbor including tilak air the great reclamation of taluk i was indeed a biggie based on practical real estate dictum if you can't move around the mountains move the mountains around [Music] over 40 years from one century to the next the tulagaya reclamation was massive expensive and explosive our hills were smudged out to make more land telugu bay was filled by rocks boulders and rubble from the hills and brought to the fill site by purpose-built railways [Music] the hills were broken apart through firepower eyewitnesses recounted the impact of dynamites it is somewhat remarkable that these small charges of dynamite make the most noise the larger ones creating a deep rumbling sound pieces of rock often fly great distances a good-sized piece having come crashing through the roof of the house occupied by the engineering charge at least 100 yards from the spot of course nothing went without hitch one mistake delayed the project by more than two decades turning the bay into a basin the original idea was to create a bund but before it could be filled an enclosing sea wall had to be built measuring 5000 feet the plan was for two teams to work from either end to finish in the middle it was tough strong currents meant that work could only be done during low spring tides which was fortnightly around midnight over 10 years work progressed until the teams were about 880 feet apart then came the uh-oh a major sinkhole prevented anything to be built on it the sea wall was doomed with a gaping hole thus it was left as is the mistake turned into a berth for smaller vessels like a toothless grin telugu basin became a distinctive feature of the waterfront in a sense that was actually beneficial to trade because singapore wound up very dependent on lightridge industries so it becomes the home of black hole those falco are usually burped within the basin at night and then the workers who work on the drug call they will generally stay near near them ayah based on the royal basin area singapore talking about [Music] foreign basin functioned until 1976 when more reclamation wiped its smile away [Music] just as the south bank of the river was the business end the north bank was reserved for white collar activities and rnr a popular place during colonial times was the esplanade which before reclamation referred to the padang but came to mean the promenade after land was made [Music] such reclamation projects are not economically driven in the strict sense of the term instead is to create a sense of civic pride and to install features in the urban landscape that point directly to the imperial presence the imperial presence was reinforced when the esplanade was renamed queen elizabeth walk [Music] there was the war monument called the senator but there's another older monument the kimchi water fountain and my children like to play with the water people choose to come late afternoon or in the evening for a walk relax to look towards the sea there were adventures whereby parents would sit down watching the kids playing around let the seabees blow against you according to raffles town plan the esplanade and beach road were designed for the chichis the original beach road ran along the coast from stamford canal to rocha river john turnbull thompson's painting shows the sandy path by the water's edge alongside it are the tree-lined homes of wealthy european merchants at the top of the row was raffle's institution the original one with the sea lapping at the front lawn it became a template for brick and mortar western style homes the hokkiens called the district jita king referring to the 20 units of villas that followed the template raffles hotel was originally one of these homes a series of reclamations pushed the beach further away and undermined the value of the neighborhood the elites moved out and their homes converted to hotels the raffles being an example the new land became a mixed-use development which included a market army barracks police station and bus depot [Music] the reclamations were made at a heavy cost to the natural resources and local cultures especially in the kallang basin region one of the biggest of course most cataclysmic points of erasure was the building of the kalang airport which resulted in the reclamation and obliteration of the entire suite of waterfront settlements or kampungs right at kalang [Music] responding to the demands of the 1930s the new waterfront at kalang allowed for cutting-edge air travel with its curvaceous aerodrome by the water [Music] it's ready for safety in case of brain crash so it's nearer to to the sea so also to draw water to put off fire and all these are actually much easier in case of crash vending it also can land the plane into the sea so that is why today we see our training airport also picked by the sea capturing the zeitgeist of the art deco era is the circular landing strip whose outline is still visible today if you're a bird or a drone the aerodrome was reclaimed from the swamps at the confluence of three rivers kalang rocha and gailan an area that was a bane of colonial authorities and so that the idea was that by reclaiming this land replacing the swamps you would eliminate breeding grounds for mosquitoes and make singapore a more healthful environment the aerodrome project displaced the older more organic way of life of the orang lauds who took their name from the river orang who also was sometimes known by the slightly more elaborate term with the qualifier bidwanda biduanda kalang viduanda refers to messengers as well as musicians so yes today you see the ronaldo as people living on their little boats they probably did that in the old days but they were more than that they were the warriors of the sultan groups of orangut and orang salad were in fact facilitators of the movements of kings and the shifts of dynasties it was an auranglau who brought the message from the temengong in singapore to hussein in banging that that hey raffles is here the bridge are here to and we want to do a deal with you that was the role they actually played they were the emissaries and they were power in the malacca and johar courts so these are affiliated groups who distinguish themselves from each other according to occupational niches as well as roles so for example there was one group that actually specialized in the making of roco roots using nipa palm leaf and then there were other groups that engaged in uh ship repair the mending of sails fishing and so on my great grandfather he was involved in shipping building of ships the big sailboats as well as piloting the ships and helping other ships into the capital harbour my grandmother comes from the suku kalang she used to tell me stories about how people just lived by the river either on their stealth houses but also in the house boats [Music] so there was a story one of the orang kalang had given birth to twins and one of the twins was a white crocodile and they released the the white crocodile the boy putting into the kalang river the voyage became something of a guardian spirit for the oranguala and the twin would have certain control over the white crocodile this control he or she could actually pass it down from generation to generation she had like really fantastic tales of the orangutan they could walk underwater they could control the currents and the wind so i grew up really looking up to orang and then uh when i went to school um and when they talked about it was always pirates so it kind of there was a bit of a tension there between my childhood stories and what i was hearing at school and reading at school so it i took it upon myself to to find out a bit more about the orangutan alongside the oranguts were other indigenous groups many of whom were involved in a port that for a while rivaled that at singapore river kalang rocha galam made up a port district in the 17th century and continued to function even after the british arrival the main players here were the chinese who came looking for exotica like sea cucumber feathers birds nests and turtle shells in exchange for gold their trading partners were various archipelago groups and especially the boogies kaplan club has been a favorite spot for the bugis okay uh before the arrival of raffles because this has been a favorite spot to to trade there was a natural beach front just after the istana so the ships could actually drop their anchor there on the eastern side of kapuglam we have the khalang river here on the western part we have the singapore river and most importantly we have the fresh water supply from pancholaran uh so during the boogie season in the month of july to september they would come in hundreds of vessels and they will store their cargo state so in the month of uh february to may that will be the junk season where the chinese would come in numbers so that was when the chinese would actually look at the bugis cargo and they do butt trading the status quo was disrupted by the british arrival whose town plan forced the bugis from galam to kalang where they made inroads to various parts of the island [Music] eventually they too would assimilate into the wider malay community through intermarriage many of their descendants are unaware of this heritage in the past when we heard about the boogies they always focus on things like piracy boogie street or bugis junction so this kind of questions led me to identify my buddhist roots in singapore all the ethnic community from south sulasi which is the boney from sopeng from akasa they are all collectively known as bugis in makkasa we have this headdress called the pasapu okay for for myself no i'm a makassarist i'm from akasa they would uh see for us so if you look at those early traders across singapore the one that operated the boat the boats the brahus known as the fantasy or palari they were mostly the makassaris the makasari's finishi added to the lively shipbuilding shipyard boat-based theme of the kalang seascape until the mid-1950s the lots of shipyards in the 80s including my dad my late dad who worked at the boss worship yacht at the takalang tanjung ru area so it was a very interesting place there are lots of boats here until the time when they built the nickel highway the expressway with that i tried to capture as many of these historical aspects as possible into the painting so these boats were eventually shifted to pasapanjang eventually they just disappeared the kallang project was the last major colonial reclamation it would be another 30 years before the upheavals would begin again this time out in the east where a laid-back life could be found so too deep dark layers of history [Music] the east coast has many things to many people over many many centuries of history today it's known as the more laid-back part of town the getaway place [Music] but beneath the ordered lines lies a past full of turbulence and upheavals here began an ambitious reclamation project that changed the face of the east coast and wiped out a large part of its heritage [Music] for a start the road to changi airport was once the sea of tanamera basar a settlement so ancient that it appeared on 17th century maps this map of eradia shows a lot of sites in singapore and it was printed in 1604 but actually is based on things that were data was collected in the late 16th century so it even dates back before 1604. the spelling may look strange but the names are familiar tanomera badok tanjong ru not only were these places already settled in 1604 they were of strategic interest to portuguese map maker manuel godino de eradia he was in charge of malacca's naval forces and he saw quite independently that singapore would make a much better place to have a naval base than malacca so he must have actually set foot on singapore and collected all this data the names of the villages that we still know today along the east coast so obviously he was looking at the resources of singapore in general looking where would be the best place to build a fort a portuguese fort in singapore never happened but war became a major theme of east coast history on its shores and in the seas nearby many epic battles were fought in 1603 of changi the portuguese and the dutch engaged in the naval battle sparked off by the santa catarina incident santa catarina was actually a ship by a portuguese ship that was captured by the dutch in february of 1603 it was returning from macau to malacca with a full cargo of things that picked up in china they would have come down past gilman from singapore up to malacca a lot of the malays didn't like the portuguese of course because the portuguese had taken their kingdom away from them they made an alliance with the dutch and they hid in between changi and the south end of the zohore point and they had scout maybe orong who told them okay the big galleon is coming now because portuguese galleons were quite large had good argument but in the end they captured the santa catarina sailed it back to europe and sold the cargo in the harbor in amsterdam the albo was hospital whatever else was sold for i think three million builders a large portion of which was chinese blue and white pottery this is the first big shipment of blue and white pottery ever to get to europe so that opened up the eyes of the induction wow this sort of wealth that can be got here a defense written by dutch lawyer hugo groteus justified the hijack of the santa catarina using an argument still relevant today the first statement of the idea of the freedom of the seas and this precedent was still being argued when the law of the sea unclosed was being negotiated in the 21st century as payback for the hijack the portuguese blockaded the prized access to johor river the dutch responded and a naval battle ensued between the two western powers in october 1603 of chung so this map was produced to commemorate this particular battle where the dutch is trying to overpower the portuguese to break the blockage of the johor state so the dutch came here with 40 smaller ships the long and short of it was that the portuguese were defeated in that sea battle the significant thing about this 1607 map is that it is the first currently known map that shows the detail of singapore's coastline from the changi area all the way to the south southern coast of singapore nowadays we we tend to use maps for navigation purposes i think in the earlier days it was uh used as a form of a treasure to show off the wealth because the information on other places is very difficult to get later maps less whimsical show geological details no longer extend often mapped out are the red cliffs of tanamero so the red cliffs were actually quite a useful reference point okay i know exactly where i am now and that's why you have places named after them tana mara these red clips dhana mira were the exposed side of a low hill but the reason why it was visible is because it was being eroded the waves were eating it away and so the vegetation didn't have time to cover it up and so the red would keep on being fresh they wouldn't be old and exposed over a long time it'd always be completely new the british explorer who came pass by there saw two red cliffs one at taney marabasa and one at tan america chill the british named them as big red cliff and small red cliff i was born in america chill in 1946 at that time my father had a farm to get to the beach we had to walk up north this stretch of tana merakichi road and then when we get to the top wow it's a wonderful sight with a breeze blowing against you and of course to go down to the beach there was a flight of steps i think must be a few hundred steps right i don't know who believed the hill of poverty avenue is the last remaining sign of what was once done america cheer here was back to the war theme the colonial government established a military base around changi point in the 1930s machine gun pill boxes were installed all along the coast and in the 40s along the beach of changi and badok the japanese massacred and buried their victims [Music] yet in a few short years the area became fertile grounds for happy memories without sounds there were two gun turrets they were unused that became our little headquarters for play one of the things that we also found as we played along the you know the seaside was actually unspent uh you know bullets from second world war and so we would peel off the head from the body you know remove the small little gun powder fuses and so we would drop them into ant's nest and burn it and just you know watch the misery that we cause we end but those are all child kids you know kids you know play thing the distinctive features of the east coast were coconut groves and bungalows leading to this part of the world was the imaginatively named east coast road built in the 1930s to enable greater access to fresh sea air as a respite from busy city life many of the wealthy built seaside mansions some of which eventually became hotels the most famous one was the sea view originally built in the 1900s for manasseh maya well-known leader of the jewish community these prestigious homes boasted exclusive facilities usually structures built over water one was a pagar a swimming pool made by fencing an area off the sea wooden stakes and later concrete piles were used to make this enclosure not many gave public access [Music] now i remember there were only three one is singapore swimming club the other at cotton park and the third one was a chinese swimming club another exclusive facility was the private jetty prior to the road transport was mainly by water and boat services provided the commute from city to the east coast and even from suburb to suburb common features for all the houses on the edge were sea wall and direct access to the beach some of these mansions like the grand hotel and east coast icon may have already been destroyed but an intact sea wall is a reminder of grander times you see the step over there it was the exit from the grand hotel to the beach the beach was here before and then the sea there was no more imperial road [Music] the east coast wasn't only for the rich all along the shorelines were settlements and kampongs i grew up in buda i was born in badou actually at the corner which is where the camp is now my house was right behind the budo rest house which is about 50 yards away from the coastline [Music] most of the clients were actually british soldiers and their families each friday night and saturday night there was dancing there was a three-piece band and they were playing a lot of songs from the 1930s and 40s and people were dancing foxtrot roses and whatever my parents once in a while you know took time off to dance you know our days were spent mostly roaming around the beach it was high tide we would be there swimming and then during low tide the sea the water would be out we could actually walk along the the sands and a mud and be able to catch prawns little fish crabs and all kinds of clams my neighbor was a fish retailer he sells fish in the market but he doesn't catch the fish himself so he goes to mataikan which is about five miles or four miles away every morning at five o'clock the trip to mataikan was actually a walk along the coast we actually walk on the beach yourself on the left hand side you see a lot of houses near the coast but a lot of coconut trees protruding onto the white sands you know of the beach it was actually a very pretty sight [Music] coconut plantations fueled the rich while fishing was the livelihood of many honest folk of the east of the many fishing villages there the largest would have been ciglamp and it was here that an unusual group of fishermen called home [Music] they were here from the late 1800s to the eve of the war many of them came mostly from okinawa japan at the height of it they numbered one and a half thousand but managed to supply more than half of the daily seafood needs of the country their secret teamwork and high tech [Music] they were actually using motorized vessels which many of the fishing communities in singapore and in malaya at that time didn't use at all the other thing was the fact that they were actually using ice in various significant quantities to actually preserve the fish that they caught ice and cold storage was still an emerging technology at this point in time whereas local fishermen employed methods of fishing close to coast the okinawans boldly went where locals hadn't gone before the coral reefs which they actually fished at would actually be up to 300 miles away from from singapore their method called muro ami required teamwork each unit had a large motorized parent ship equipped with ice and provisions in tow were at least four non-powered boats labor was provided by 50 able-bodied japanese men out in the reefs they would dive with only a pair of goggles as protective gear they used rocks to hit the corals which scared the fish into the driftnet corals were harmed and sometimes divers too drowning and shark attacks were not uncommon once full the parent ship would leave replaced by another this went on for months on end the method led to quantity and variety they could supply more uncommon fish like tangieri kuning parang and especially dela also called huang zazoho in tiochu de la eventually made its way into our national diet because it was so affordable the fish became so affordable that fish like people started to make fish balls from torla the japanese dominated the industry where each person netted an average of 100 kilograms of fish a day whereas the local guy only managed the tenth of that number things got a bit scaly however by the late 1930s when japanese geopolitics became questionable the japanese fishermen actually were financed by the japanese ministry of agriculture and commerce to actually come here to explore whether there were fisheries to be exploited in this part of the world even though the japanese had left by the time of the war fishing continued to play a vital role in many villages along the east coast way into the early 60s significant fishing villages included kampung tobacco they would soon disappear when the country moved into another world the early decades of independence saw the country busying away and industrializing the economy the intent was to move from third world to first and that involved even the laid-back part of town key to this objective was to build more land for infrastructure and housing eyes turned to the east the coast to reclaim from the sea further east to japan for the expertise and so the japanese returned not to fish not to fight but to forge new land [Music] japanese company obayashi was the first to be contracted for the reclamation of the east coast in 1963 in the experimental phase a cut was made out of little red cliff [Music] the first phase while the earth was dumb is where atomizer secondary school is they actually were digging up soil from the hills and putting onto the lorries and dumping it into the sea then eventually the whole sea coast would turn into orangey mud uh water right it's not like clear like before we then realized that the seafront that we had enjoyed for many years was going to disappear it was quite a sobering uh period known as the great reclamation cira's work began in 1966. over 20 years through several phases the natural landscape was dug and dredged the main source of the fill coming from the nearby hills and the sea [Music] the earthquake machines they cut the earth and the conveyor belt will convey the earth to the sea along upwards goes through it a huge bailey's bridge was built right the conveyor belt were on was on the bridge and then it rolls the earth to the sea and then after the earth dumb into the sea a period was left for the earth to settle the new land was used for parks ports and apartments marine parade was the first housing estate in the world to be built entirely on reclaimed land the first flats were ready in 1973. in those days many people there scared of flesh on the kingdom but then i understand that sandy ground makes very good foundation for flair and so i applied and got it when i applied the housing board the fire room flat at marin parade the price was only 28 000 five but on belting date there is about a year or so later it went up to thirty five thousand five when i moved in to the flat there were still no amenities like market food center shop is only later on when more residents move in to the area then the ammunities start to come in [Music] the hills that were leveled were resurrected for high-rise living complete with the reservoir hundreds of thousands found new homes in bedok new town while many said hello to a new way of life many others were saying goodbye to the original coastline further gains were made in the last decade of the 20th century and into the present each time the sands pushed out the old ways gave in and when finally a new landscape is made many many would have forgotten what it was like once in singapore's lost waterfronts [Music] you

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Length: 47min 31sec (2851 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 19 2022