I hope all the original museums can roll up to this standard

📝Singapore Travelogue part16: Chinatown Heritage Centre📝 🖼🖼🖼🖼 The Chinatown Heritage Centre is one of the busiest attractions in Singapore, an unassuming three-story shophouse on Chinatown Street. From the outside, it looks only a few meters wide, but inside it is very long and thin, making it quite interesting to explore. The entire heritage centre realistically restores the interior decoration and layout of this shophouse in Chinatown during the 1950s. Here, there are not only inanimate objects, but also the past of each resident, who have names, identities, professions, interests, sorrows, and joys. You can see their photos here, hear their stories, and travel back in time to 60 years ago. 🎞️🎞️🎞️🎞️ The shop owner's family were tailors, and the shop was called Teck Cheong Tailor. The sewing machines, mannequins, and various fabrics and threads in the shop are all as they were originally. Several members of their family were squeezed into a small room behind the tailor's shop front. But at least they could afford electric fans, theatre tickets, and more than one photograph, which was much better than the bare room of the two apprentice students next door. 🛏️🛏️🛏️🛏️ Upstairs, there was a small compartment with several bunks, rented out to rickshaw pullers by the bunk. Usually, two or three pullers would rent one bunk. They would come back to sleep in shifts, day and night. On the bed lay quietly the big opium pipe that the puller smoked. The audio guide explains so clearly why they smoked opium and how expensive it actually was, making it so heartbreaking to listen to. The next compartment was rented to a mobile dessert stall, and the one next to that to a clog-maker, who was skilled and did good business, with his home filled with shoes. 🚶🏻🚶🏻🚶🏻🚶🏻 A slightly more spacious compartment near the street was rented by a down-and-out physician. Although he was not very wealthy himself, he often did not charge poor patients when he saw them. The next room was rented by several lifelong unmarried women who had adopted the doctor's young daughter. Although they were all tenants, they lived as if they were one family. Another compartment was rented by a similarly thin woman with a red headscarf. In the audio guide, one red headscarf sighed to another, saying that her health was getting worse and worse... 💽💽💽💽 You can hear the stories of joy and sorrow of each family in the audio guide, and what defeated me were those ubiquitous details: the meticulously written income and expenses in Teck Cheong Tailor's ledger, the photos of former residents in the frames on the wall, the half-washed dishes in the kitchen, the cockroaches crawling in the corners of the walls... So many details, so many touches, and they are all real history. They are based on the memories of the actual residents at the time and the photos and items provided by their descendants, and have been restored into such a museum. These ordinary and trivial real details have defeated many other noble and alienating museums, and I sincerely hope that all original museums can roll up to this standard. Visited on May 6, 2016