Singapore Quarry and the Chia Eng Say connection.

Strangely, small coincidences seem to keep popping up in sequence for me.
It all started with the KTM railway closure. (click on link to go there)
Visiting the Rail Mall led me to Fuyong Estate and to Jalan Asas.
This then led me onwards to the old shortcut to the Singapore Quarry Park.
At the quarry park there is a plaque that reads "A Quarry story of....Chia Eng Say..."

The plaque at the Singapore Quarry Park.

Click to read the Ode mentioning Chia Eng Say.

Then just last night, I chanced upon a blog by a Kevin Lee mentioning a disused 'nameless' road running by Rail Mall train tracks. He wondered why it was there.
Wow, just what are all these coincidences ?
I realised the common link to them all is Chia Eng Say!

The original Chia Eng Say Road ran beside the railway truss bridge.
Now abandoned and covered with detritus.

A brief background to the man, the road and the quarry

Chia Eng Say Road was a private road built by the quarry company for access to their quarrying operations. It was the only access from Upper Bukit Timah Road to the quarries and ran parallel to the former KTM railway line. I can still recall trucks with their load of huge granite rocks rumbling along the road, off to some construction site somewhere in developing Singapore.

The road ran through a Chinese kampong known to us 'locals' as Kampung Chia Eng Say.
The kampong has been demolished and the homesteaders have been resettled in HDB housing, I presume. How sad.

Two of my old schoolmates used to live in that kampong, Quek Chee Ling and Wong Bee Leng. Alas, I've completely lost contact with them after our school days ended.
I can recall visiting them often at the kampong, especially during the times when the Chinese wayangs played during some religious celebrations.
I used to lived at Fuyong Estate that was just beside the old quarry worker's kampung.

A footbridge ran from Chia Eng Say Road over the KTM railway line.
This gave the kampong folks and quarry workers direct access to Upper Bukit Timah Road.

The cul de sac at Jalan Asas. The playground on the right was where the old kampong was located.

The secret shortcut to the quarry at the end of the cul de sac.

Who was Chia Eng Say?
Mr Chia Eng Say was what we would call an entrepreneur today. A multi-millionaire businessman from Fujian, China, who established businesses in Penang and Singapore in the early 1900s.
He apparently lived in Katong with his large progeny, believed to be 7 sons and 15 daughters in all!  Old newspaper announcements of the past had several reports of his sons and daughters being married off with grand dinners held at his mansion at Katong.

The Chia Eng Say Quarries
Chia Eng Say obtained the rights to mining the granite on the mid-western area of the Bukit Timah Ridge in the 1930s. There he started quarrying operations at two separate but adjacent sites facing the 8-1/2 milestone Upper Bukit Timah Road. The two adjacent quarries eventually merged into a single quarry. They were initially known as the Chia Eng Say Quarries. 

How it became known as the Singapore Quarry was simply a matter of convenience.
Chia had set up several subsidiary companies to run his quarrying business.
The major company was called the Singapore Quarry Co Pte Ltd, and this was the firm that undertook the actual mining.
After Chia Eng Say died in 1943, the business was usually referred to as Singapore Quarry.
The name became pegged to the actual quarry site itself. Thus, the Chia Eng Say Quarries became simply known as the Singapore Quarry.
The quarry was closed when the Singapore government ordered all mainland quarrying of granite to cease in 1970.

The private road, Chia Eng Say Road, located beside the railway truss bridge, became disused over time and was later expunged.  In the 1980s, NParks recovered the land as part of the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve. The quarry was to be converted into a nature park.
A new access path to the nature park quarry was formed from disused sections of the old Chia Eng Say Road.
The old name of Chia Eng Say Quarry was then replaced officially as the Singapore Quarry Nature Park.

Kampung Chia Eng Say
Chia Eng Say also built homes for his workers nearby, using the unallocated land that was beside the quarry adjacent Fuyong Estate. These were basically squatter land with temporary occupation licences given to Chia's company. Thus, colloquially, the kampung came to be known as kampung Chia Eng Say.

Chia Eng Say's legacy lives on
Besides being mentioned in the ode on the plaque, his name is now firmly entrenched nearby.
When the old shophouses at Fuyong Estate were re-developed into the Rail Mall, the little service access road in front of the shops was widened to a 2-lane road and the name Chia Eng Say Road was transferred to this upgraded stretch of road.

Trivia: In 1937, Chia Eng Say won the tender to supply all the granite to build the (old) Supreme Court building. The stones came from this quarry.

The service road in front of Rail Mall is now named after Chia Eng Say.

  

Below is an overhead aerial view of the Singapore Quarry
with the defunct Chia Eng Say Road leading up to it.

In those days.....

Yesterday I took a last look at the old railway bridge at Upper Bukit Timah Road.
This bridge is due to dismantled soon, with the return of the railway land to the Singapore government.

The visit also brought me back to the old housing estate where I used to live back in the 1970s.
Called Fuyong Estate and located just bedside the KTM truss bridge. I lived there during my teen years.

This is a small freehold estate of around a hundred units, sandwiched between the old Diary Farm and the now defunct Singapore Granite Quarry. It lies on the western ridge of Bukit Timah Hill. So while I was heading to the bridge, I dropped by the estate just to see the old home and reminisce.

I could watch trains passing everyday from my house.

What was a once a simple estate of single storied bungalows, semi-detached and terraced houses has now morphed into a sad jumble of independently re-designed and re-built buildings. While there are still some single storey units, most have been redeveloped into 2, 3 or even 4 storied hulks. Some look so monstrous beside its puny neighbours.  I guess the owners are maximizing their land use. The old village atmosphere is completely lost now.

I used to live at no. 71

No 71 is at the top of the slope on the left.

Rail Mall which fronts the main Upper Bukit Timah Road was redeveloped from a row of old shop houses.  I still remember vividly the old neighbourhood provision shop and the laundry (dhoby) shop now taken over by modern MNCs like Cold Storage and Coffee Bean. Looks much better now actually.

One of the things few people ever realise is that the row of shops that now makes up Rail Mall was one of the last few places in Singapore that had the old 'bucket system' of sanitation. 'Night soil'  buckets were carted off manually everyday by the sanitation dept  in their '36 doors' lorry as we called it.
(look up Night Soil in Wiki, you'd be surprised Singapore is mentioned prominently, full of shit, haha)

I recalled that the old shortcut from the estate to the main road ran past the back lane of the shophouses and woe be you if you encounter the night soil carrier at that time! The dilemma was that you either held your breathe and continue quickly through the backlane or make a 500m detour.

The backlane. The sewers are all modern now.

The old shortcut which was just a dirt track in those days.

This was how it was done even up to the late 80s.
Salute and respect to those workers!
(Picture from National Archive database)