All in a name

In the course of my research, I stumbled upon this set of reflections by retired rubber plantation company manager Douglas Hiorns, which he shared with the National Archives of Singapore in 1999. According to him, the origins of old place names were more from the ground up than top down:

So this crown reserve was what was known as Jalan or Lorong Puah Bak Tiong. So when houses were built on the roadside, it was natural to happen that the road was also known as this Jalan Puah Bak Tiong. But nobody wanted to have this name. So after some time, it was renamed and became Plantation Avenue. And to this day it is known as Plantation Avenue. So I think that one has to realise that in naming of roads, the government doesn’t come along and say, “Oh, we are going to call this Jalan Kayu or we are going to call this Lorong Buangkok.” The name would obviously grow from the inhabitants.

Plantation Avenue in the 1960s. Credit: RAFSA Collection, courtesy of National Archives of Singapore.

(Puah Bak Tiong is Hokkien for “Cemetery of Burst Stomachs”. The area which later became Plantation Avenue off Yio Chu Kang Road once had a cemetery for victims of infectious diseases, hence the graphic name.)

For instance there is one named the Tongkang Pecah, Lorong Tongkang Pecah and I can imagine that many years ago, you might have one Malay who lived around there meeting another Malay he’d not seen for many years and he’d say, “Oh, where do you live at present? I haven’t seen you for a long time.” He said, “Oh, I live along the road there.” “But where do you mean, where?” “Well, you know there’s just by my house there is a ‘tongkang pecah’, a broken barge, well I live there.” So, he’d probably call him Ahmad “tongkang pecah”. The Ahmad who lives in “tongkang pecah”. So gradually the area will become known as Tongkang Pecah. Then when the government goes around with their signboards up goes Tongkang Pecah.

(The area called Tongkang Pechah used to be by the Sungei Punggol. Of course, it has long disappeared, and it is now part of Sengkang town, served by Sengkang West Avenue.)

Broken barges no more - the area once known as Tongkang Pechah is now filled with the towering blocks of Sengkang West Avenue. Credit: Google Maps.

So that is how many of these names come into being, just by local usage. And it’s not that the name is given to it by the government, not at all. The names grow up with the people and they grow out of the locality and this is the interesting thing about it. Even Bras Basah Road, wet rice road. Obviously why, because the rice coming to Singapore, the grains would be spread out along the road to dry, so hence the name. And this is part of the history, the very names themselves suggest the trades, the people, the buildings, the activities that take place.

Hiorns was born in 1925, so he’s probably passed on by now - if so, may he rest in peace.

The Caravanserai

I recently came across this intriguing creation, a necessary offspring of the age-old need for intercontinental, yet plodding, transport: The Caravanserai.

From Wikipedia:

A caravanserai or caravansary was a roadside inn where travellers (caravaners) could rest and recover from the day’s journey. Caravanserais supported the flow of commerce, information and people across the network of trade routes covering Asia, North Africa and Southeast Europe, most notably the Silk Road. Although many were located along rural roads in the countryside, urban versions of caravanserais were also historically common in cities throughout the Islamic world, though they were often called by other names such as khan, wikala, or funduq.

The word کاروانسرای kārvānsarāy is a Persian compound word combining kārvān “caravan” with sarāy “palace”, “building with enclosed courts”. Here “caravan” means a group of traders, pilgrims or other travellers, engaged in long-distance travel. The word is also rendered as caravansary, caravansaray, caravanseray, caravansara, and caravansarai. In scholarly sources, it is often used as an umbrella term for multiple related types of commercial buildings similar to inns or hostels, whereas the actual instances of such buildings had a variety of names depending on the region and the local language. However, the term was typically preferred for rural inns built along roads outside of city walls.

Caravanserais were a common feature not only along the Silk Road, but also along the Achaemenid Empire’s Royal Road, a 2,500-kilometre-long ancient highway that stretched from Sardis to Susa according to Herodotus: “Now the true account of the road in question is the following: Royal stations exist along its whole length, and excellent caravanserais; and throughout, it traverses an inhabited tract, and is free from danger.” Other significant urban caravanserais were built along the Grand Trunk Road in the Indian subcontinent, especially in the region of Mughal Delhi and Bengal Subah.

A 17th-century caravanserai in southern Iran. Credit: Bernard Gagnon, CC BY-SA 4.0.

A 16th-century caravanserai in Cairo, Egypt. Credit: Sailko, CC BY 3.0.

In the first few years after the founding of modern Singapore in 1819, development was concentrated in the southern part of the island, where the port town was located at the mouth of the Singapore River. However, from the 1820s, trunk roads began to be laid down from the port to eventually all corners of the island, complementing the agricultural development of the island’s interior. My book Jalan Singapura details this.

Back then, transport was rudimentary - people travelled on foot, or using horses, bullocks, and associated carts and carriages. Cross-Island travel would have been slow, taking hours. I can imagine government or municipal officials, such as surveyors, taking a good part of a day to travel from the Town to a far-flung corner which would now be Jurong, Woodlands, or Changi, spending the night there, and then returning to “civilisation” the following day.

Which is where my interest in Caravanserai comes in. I wonder whether such facilities were built in the early days of modern Singapore, in the 1820s and 1830s, when cross-island transport was still in its early legs. Was there a market for such a business? Did the authorities run such facilities instead? How were these buildings like? Who patronised them?

And the challenge for me, the historian - if they had existed, how do I go about finding them?

I will take on this challenge.

The word serai is sometimes used with the implication of caravanserai. A number of place-names based on the word sarai have grown up: Mughal Serai, Sarai Alamgir and the Delhi Sarai Rohilla railway station for example, and a great many other places are also based on the original meaning of “palace”.

Of course, the Singapore place name “Geylang Serai” immediately comes to mind. However, this time, the “Serai” in “Geylang Serai” is Malay for lemongrass, which used to be grown in the area. I am not aware of any other place name in Singapore with “Serai” in it. That said, I am very happy to be proven wrong!

Walking the ground

Spent the afternoon doing groundwork for my second book. Fortunately, the skies were clear and the sun was out, which made for great photos.