by Kevin Lee, with additional research by Ho Chi Tim

Off Dunearn Road is a road with a picturesque name: Jalan Kampong Chantek. This road (jalan) once led to a to a pretty (chantek) village (kampong).

A search on Google throws up over 500 mentions of the road name, mostly relating to property sales and international schools in the area. There is one mention (Creamer, 2003) of one Iskandar Jalil, a potter who was born in Singapore in 1940 and “grew up at Kampong Chantek at Bukit Timah”.

The village, and the road, supposedly got its name after a visitor saw the village and remarked how pretty the village was (Savage and Yeoh, 2004).

There is no village there now, just landed property for the landed gentry like company directors, and international schools for wheel-heeled scions.

One building there, a bungalow, shows its age: it has holes in the roof, wooden windows with slats (which mean they were made in pre-air-conditioning days). There are holes in the wall for air-conditioning – the single unit type, not multi-split).

I wonder who has lived there and why the house has been abandoned for so long. Once upon a time, the houses in the area must have looked just like this one, just that new owners decided to increase the built-up area and built two to three-storey buildings.

Jalan Kampong Chantek is a quiet road – so quiet that no road markings are needed; there are no yellow lines or white lines. At the end of the road is the Murnane Service Reservoir, which was completed in 1956 (Kog, 2001). I’m guessing it’s the only reservoir in Singapore whose waters can’t be seen from the road, as it surrounded by an embankment and fenced up.

The writer enjoys journeys to wide open spaces and into the past by bicycle. He rides around Singapore occasionally to “paint with light”, photographing scenes that may shed light on bits of the island’s past. This way, he can relive in future memories of the past even when what has been photographed has disappeared. After all, when things are gone, all we have left are memories which may dim with time – and photographs.

References

Creamer R. 2003, “Iskandar Jalil”, retrieved 17 Jun 07 from http://infopedia.nlb.gov.sg/articles/SIP_267_2005-01-13.html

Kog Y. C., 2001, “Natural Resource Management and Environmental Security in Southeast Asia: Case Study of Clean Water Supplies in Singapore”, retrieved 17 Jun 07 from http://www.rsis.edu.sg/publications/WorkingPapers/WP15.PDF

Savage, Victor R. and Yeoh, Brenda S. A., 2004 (2nd Edition), “Toponymics: A Study of Singapore Street Names”, Singapore, Eastern University Press

Tags: Jalan Kampong Chantek, Shedding Some Light, Singapore, street names

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 26th, 2007 at 2:21 pm and is filed under Impressions | Conversations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.