Kampong Chai Chee

History
Chai Chee began as a village of attap huts set with coconut and banana trees in an area off old Upper Changi Road. Around the 1920s, a Chinese village sprouted around the Peng Ann and Peng Ghee Road areas with a bustling market centred at the junction of these two roads. The eastern section, once a rubber plantation at the turn of the 20th century, was a huge, exclusive and self-contained Malay kampong, appropriately named Kampong Melayu.

Kampong Chai Chee constituency was formed on 1 March 1968. It included portions of Kaki Bukit, Fengshan, Siglap, Tanah Merah, Changi, Tampines, Kampong Kembangan, Ubi and Opera estate. Today, it is about 1/10 of its original size. In the 1970s, the kampongs made way for modern HDB flats and industrial parks.The old market at Peng Ann Road and Peng Ghee Road moved to its new home in Block 29, Chai Chee Road. The industrial estates are now home to several large electronics factories. By the early 1980s Kampong Chai Chee became a completely urbanised town with its own Community Centre in Bedok North Avenue 1, opened on 15 August 1981. The oldest area of the estate is Ping Yi Neighbourhood where apartments are three- and five-storey high.The hub or town square of Chai Chee is in the Ansar Neighbourhood where many shops, restaurants and coffee-shops are located. As a result of redevelopment, the Ping-an (Peng Ann) Neighbourhood apartment blocks are newer and taller than others in the estate.

Variant Names
Kampong Chai Chee literally means "village market place", a combination of Malay and Chinese words
Malay Name: In Malay Kampong is "village"
Chinese Name: In Hokkien chai chee means "market place".



Author
Vernon Cornelius



References
Tan, Sumiko. (1993). Chai Chee revisited (pp. 11-14, 19, 29, 40). Singapore: Kampong Chai Chee CCC.
(Call no.: RSING 959.57 TAN) 



The information in this article is valid as at 1999 and correct as far as we are able to ascertain from our sources. It is not intended to be an exhaustive or complete history of the subject. Please contact the Library for further reading materials on the topic.

Subject
Architecture and Landscape>>Streets and Places
Geography>>Population>>Urban Planning
Suburbs--Singapore
Urbanization--Singapore
Arts>>Architecture>>Public and commercial buildings
People and communities>>Social groups and communities
Arts>>Architecture>>Residential buildings



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