25 May 2025 · Balestier · 3.4 km · 70 min · 31°C, still air

Balestier, Slowly

Balestier Road is named after Joseph Balestier, the first American consul to Singapore, who arrived in the 1830s and ran a sugar plantation on this land. The sugar failed. The name stayed, attached now to a road that mostly sells lighting fixtures, bak kut teh and tau sar piah.

It is not a heritage district in the curated sense. It is a working road with old buildings on it, which I prefer. Art Deco shophouse rows sit next to a tyre shop. The five-foot ways here are interrupted by driveways and generations of renovation, and you step down and up perhaps twenty times in a kilometre.

Wan Qing Yuan

Halfway along is a villa, late-nineteenth century, sitting behind a lawn: Wan Qing Yuan, now the Sun Yat Sen Nanyang Memorial Hall. Sun Yat Sen used it as the Southeast Asian base of the Tongmenghui, the revolutionary alliance whose work ended the Qing dynasty. It was gazetted as a national monument in 1994.

What gets me is the ordinariness of the setting. A revolution in China was partly organised from a suburban villa on a road that now has a shop selling ceiling fans.

The lighting shops

Whole blocks of them, windows full of chandeliers switched on at four in the afternoon in full daylight. Nobody has ever explained to me why lighting clustered here. Once a trade picks a road in this city it tends to stay: the road becomes the reason people come, which becomes the reason the next shop opens there.

3.4 km, 70 minutes, no shortcuts, both sides of the road. My feet were unhappy and there is nothing to be done about that.