6 December 2025 · Chinatown · Keong Saik · 2.0 km · 52 min · 30°C, hazy sun

Under the Five-Foot Way

Walk the older shophouse streets and you are mostly not on the street. You are one step up, under the building, in a continuous covered passage that runs from one shop to the next. Malay calls it kaki lima, five feet. English calls it the five-foot way. It is the reason you can cross Chinatown in a downpour and arrive only half wet.

It comes from the 1822 town plan drawn up under Raffles, which required buildings to carry a verandah of a set depth, open at all times, as a continuous covered passage on each side of the street. A rule about frontages became, two centuries later, the most humane piece of infrastructure on the island.

Who the corridor belongs to

Being both private property and public passage, it has always been argued over. Shopkeepers stacked goods in it. Hawkers cooked in it. Barbers and letter-writers worked in it. In 1888 the colonial authorities decided to clear the obstructions and were met with several days of rioting, which is remembered as the Verandah Riots¹ — a fight, in the end, over whether a covered corridor is a shop's floor or a city's.

The argument never fully resolved. It just got quieter. Today the encroachments are a rack of dried goods, an A-board, a cat, and the occasional table for two put out at an hour when the officers are unlikely to come by.

What it does to the way you walk

A five-foot way is narrow, so you negotiate. You meet someone, one of you turns sideways, both of you continue. Compare that with the newer sheltered linkways built between MRT stations and blocks: wide, straight, symmetrical, and you can walk their whole length without having to acknowledge anybody.

Both keep the rain off. Only one of them makes you look up.

2.0 km, 52 minutes, and I lost about ten of those minutes standing at a corner watching a shop cat refuse to move for anyone.