A Tang Dynasty City in Singapore: Flying Swordsmen, Terracotta Warriors and Pagodas

Tin Seng
You may think that is a great idea, right? Having that replica of a whole entire city in Singapore, in Jurong. But it didn’t work out. That was so strange, you know. [On the] opening day, yes, they set a record. They reported about over 5,000 visitors. It was a record at time. It was set by Haw Par Villa. We’re talking about back then, yeah. But it did not really took off because in the first year, they only attracted 800,000 visitors roughly, and that was way less their, than their target. They were targeting about a million because they’re trying to break even of the, because of the money that they spent, so they had this forecast to do so. And they were trying to attract at least a million per year, but they couldn’t do it.

[Music playing]

Jimmy
You’re listening to BiblioAsia+, a podcast produced by the National Library of Singapore. At BiblioAsia, we tell stories about Singapore’s past, some familiar, others forgotten, all fascinating.

Terracotta warriors, flying swordsmen and dancing maidens in Tang Dynasty costumes, all found in a theme park slash movie set that was built at a cost of $90 million. What could go wrong? Apparently, a lot. Some of us might remember Tang Dynasty Village, which opened in 1992. The attraction in Jurong was spread out over land that was the size of 17 football fields and featured landmarks from the ancient imperial city of Chang’an, known today as Xi’an.

In 1999, however, the city’s gates shut for good. Here to tell us about Tang Dynasty Village, which actually got promoted from a village into a city a month after its launch, is senior librarian Lim Tin Seng, intrepid time traveller, talented researcher, and BiblioAsia’s most prolific writer. Welcome to the show, Tin Seng. How are you?

Tin Seng
Yeah, I’m doing good. What? That’s a nice intro.

Jimmy
I’m glad you like it. I’m glad you like it. But before we get into the questions, can I ask, did you ever go to Tang Dynasty Village/City/whatever it is?

Tin Seng
No. To tell you the truth, no. But I’ve seen it. It’s quite hard to miss.

Jimmy
Oh, really? You’ve seen it?

Tin Seng
Yeah, because we grew up at that time. I frequent Jurong.

Jimmy
Oh, okay.

Tin Seng
So I see that it’s standing there.

Jimmy
I heard about it, but I’ve never, ever seen Tang Dynas- seen it.

Tin Seng
Yeah, because the wall is, the fortification is kinda big. And I always wonder what it is.

Jimmy
Okay. Yeah now in hindsight it sounds a little bit crazy what they did, and but I don’t want to just apply hindsight because actually, and I firmly believe that if you never fail it means that you haven’t been trying hard enough, right? So they obviously were trying to do something different. Yeah. Tell us about this whole idea. What was Tang Dynasty Village built for?

Tin Seng
Okay. Like I mentioned, I’ve never been in there. I’ve seen it from the outside. I wonder what it was. But I know that it’s a Chinese architecture. Back then as a kid you don’t know what era, whatever. But then when I chanced upon this topic, I look at the pictures, the photographs that we have in the archives and stuff. Yeah. Then I know, oh, wow, it’s this Tang Dynasty city. And as I read more, then you found out even more what is it for, right? And you thought that it was just a movie studio or was it a theme park? Because you do see performers, street performers, and all these things in the photographs, in the archival photographs.

And you do hear that there were some actors in it and stuff like that. You’re not really sure. So in fact, it was both. It was a theme park and it was also a movie studio. Now, the person behind this is a Hong Kong tycoon. Yeah. I didn’t know that as well. His name is Deacon Chiu. So he was the chairman of the Asian Television and the founder of the investment firm Far East Consortium. I think recently he passed away this year. Anyway, so he came out with this idea of building a movie studio and a theme park. A Tang [dynasty city] modelled after Chang’an, today’s Xi’an. So you have a lot of this Tang era architecture as well as other iconic Chinese architecture at that time in premodern China. Okay, other than that he wanted to set up a movie studio as well. Yeah. ’Cause he has this vision of turning Singapore into a base for making movies. 

Jimmy
And I think that was the, I think the movie studio actually was quite interesting, right? Because I think at that time we didn’t have a very big movie industry. Not that we have an enormous movie industry now, but it’d be probably much smaller back then. And so I guess the government saw this as a way to seed that whole industry.

Tin Seng
Yeah, indeed. So he actually said in the papers that the reason he won the tender for, to bid for the piece of land for his idea was because of that idea of setting up a filming studio in Singapore, and that was the selling point.

Jimmy
Tell us, why did they pick Chang’an or Xi’an as it’s now known as?

Tin Seng
Okay. From what I understand, it could be because of the buildings, because we know that Tang dynasty time, Tang dynasty era was very influential. You still see the architecture everywhere in, in Japan. Obviously, you see all these arches and edges and grooves, right?

Jimmy
It’s very distinctive.

Tin Seng
It’s very distinctive. It was like the golden era of Chinese, Imperial Chi- China, and the influence was strong. It spread across the Far East. Yeah. And all these East Asian countries, they took up this [architectural style]. So a lot of stuff actually came. The cultural part spread.

Jimmy
That makes a lot of sense. It was like a high point of Chinese culture.

Tin Seng
Yeah.

Jimmy
And to make it look realistic, what kind of things did they bring in? And it’s 17 football fields, right? This is not a small place.

Tin Seng
I didn’t know they actually spent so much time, energy to create this replica of Chang’an. Yeah. And all the landmarks, right? You had the fortification. There was a great wall in there. Okay. Yeah. And there was a bridge, a thousand-year-old bridge. The Zhao Zhou Bridge.

Jimmy
I’m not going to try to say it.

Tin Seng
It’s one of the oldest bridge in China, stone bridge, and they do a replica of it there. And they also have the Daming Palace. That was the imperial complex of the Tang dynasty.

Jimmy
Was it built to scale?

Tin Seng
I don’t think it was built to scale, but it’s a replica. Right. And the materials were sourced from China. They were imported from China. Okay, you may think that, “Ah, yeah, China stuff, so easy, right? Import in and that’s it.” Now, that, that’s today. But back then, it was a bit different. Put into context, right? Back then, yeah, you don’t have Shopee and all these things. You can’t just order and there is—

Jimmy
Roof tiles and so on.

Tin Seng
And also the production base, China back then was very different. Okay.

It was just opened up for just 10 years. You don’t have those crazy factories today and all these materials, okay? You are talking about the granites, the slabs, the roof tiles, all these things. All this, they were from China. And the fortification wall, the exterior, if you ever seen it, you see these great huge walls, right? Those were actually called green bricks, okay? And I don’t know why, but it’s not green. It was grey, and it was a material that they used during Imperial China to buildings.

Jimmy
So they used the actual materials. Yeah. They didn’t use, like, cheaper material.

Tin Seng
It sounds like it. It is from the press. That’s what they said to the press. Right. They say that these materials, most of them were already not in production. So they sourced it, and they restarted the production. So you wonder, “Whoa, serious?”

Jimmy
This is serious. It seriously sounds like a lot of money as well.

Tin Seng
Yeah, that’s why it costs so much, right?

Jimmy
Now, I see you, in your article you said it, it, the original budget was, like, 50 million, and it ballooned to 90 million or something.

Tin Seng
Yeah, 90 million. And then, yeah, some report as 100 million.

Jimmy
Wow.

Tin Seng
But I just take it from the papers. 90 million, factor in inflation. Yeah. That’s very expensive.

Jimmy
Yeah. Quite expensive. Yeah. And okay, I guess all this makes sense if you’re gonna turn it into a movie set maybe. I don’t know if it financially makes sense, but if you’re gonna turn it... if it’s used as a movie set. So were there very many movies or TV shows that were shot in this place?

Tin Seng
Yes. I didn’t know that as well. Like I said, I grew up at that time, but I did watch some of the movies.

Jimmy
Oh, were some of the movies shot there?

Tin Seng
Yeah, the two of them is by Raymond Wong from Happy Ghosts. You’re a kid. You just watch. Yeah. You don’t really care. I had no impression of where it was set.

Jimmy
You’re too young to watch it.

Tin Seng
But I know the stars in there. Right, right. Okay. Back then it was huge. It was, like, Sam Hui was there. Oh. And the first movie was, All Wells Ends Well Too. Yeah. The second one was Laughter of the Water Margins. It’s a spoof of the Chinese classic, right? The Water Margins. And yeah, like I mentioned, they have a lot of big stars in there, like Sam Hui, Ricky Hui, the Hui Brothers, and you got Maggie Cheung, Leslie Cheung, and all these things. Yeah, I didn’t know it was shot in Tang Dynasty [City].

Jimmy
I have to say, it sounds great, but in hindsight when we look back, I think there’s a reason why production companies use sound stages. They build up something that is temporary because it’s much cheaper, right? And they can reuse it. Otherwise, you can only shoot movies that are set in the Tang dynasty. And how many movies can you shoot in the Tang dynasty?

Tin Seng
Yeah, that’s why there’s a limited production. I tried to find more from our NewspaperSG online archive, but I couldn’t. Yeah. I only found another one, was the local production by SBC, yeah, Singapore Broadcasting Corporation, and it’s a Chinese drama. Yeah. I have not seen that. It’s called Legend of a Beauty. Yeah, that’s the English title.

Jimmy
What is it in Chinese?

Tin Seng
I think it was in Chinese. Yeah. So you have like Chen Liping in there. Oh, yeah. Our local stars and a Hong Kong actress, Michelle Yim. Yeah. So never heard of it, but like I said, maybe others.

Jimmy
Yeah, but really how many movies or TV shows can you set in the Tang dynasty? Yeah. Not that many, I think, before people get bored. But okay, the theme park element probably is possibly what was going to be the money spinner maybe, right? People come in and experience what, not just a part of China, but a part of China that they couldn’t experience because you would have to go back in time.

Tin Seng
Yes, indeed. Yeah. And they actually have a lot of offerings. First thing, food options. Why do I bring up food? Everywhere right now, we have all these Chinese restaurants. Oh, yeah. Mala here and mala there, right? Yes. But back then, they actually tried to bring in this culture. Yeah. They have a lot of Chinese food options. They bring, you know, street food in there.

Jimmy
Oh, okay.

That’s quite cool, actually.

Tin Seng
Yeah, and restaurants. Yeah. And they were all prepared by chefs. So when you chance upon all these materials, you have to put into context. You wear the shoe at that time, you can go like, “Oh.” The selling point was there, the idea was there, the concept was there. Because back then, that was a brilliant idea.

Jimmy
I think it was a very creative idea.

Tin Seng
And to create this Tang era village, they have a lot of street performances.

Jimmy
Oh yeah.

Tin Seng
What did they do, right?

Jimmy
I saw some pictures. People flying through the air with their swords.

Tin Seng
Yeah, all these wuxia, right? Yeah, yeah. Wuxia. Yeah, all these stunt show. In fact, that was, like, the talk of the town, when it was open. And yeah, they tried to sell this. This is their main selling point, the flying swordsman. Although, we must know this is not historically accurate. Really, this is all created by the Hong Kong filmmakers.

So that’s the stunt shows. Yeah. And they leap across rivers and stuff, and you have performances by troops from China. Yeah. And at one point, they even asked their own employees to do it, because the visa thing, they were delayed. They were held up, so the performers couldn’t come. Yeah, and the actors were actually the workers there, you know?

Jimmy
Oh. Yeah, I wish you had put that in the story. That’s very funny. Yeah. How popular was the theme park? This is what, yet another, some attraction in Jurong, right? How popular was it?

Tin Seng
Yeah, how popular? Yeah, you may think that is a great idea, right? Having that replica of a whole entire city in Singapore, in Jurong, but it didn’t work out.

That was so strange. On opening day, yes, they set a record. Five, they reported about over 5,000 visitors. It was a record at the time. It was set by Haw Par Villa. We’re talking about back then, yeah. But it did not really took off, because in the first year, they only attracted 800,000 visitors, roughly, and that was way less than their target. They were targeting about a million. Yeah. Because they’re trying to break even because of the money they had spent, so they had this forecast to do. And they were trying to attract at least a million per year, but they couldn’t do it.

And by 1995, so that’s about three years after it opened, what happened is it halved. They were only attracting 100,000 visitors. Yeah. That is quite bad, you know? Yeah. For such an expensive attraction. Because talking about others, right? Singapore Zoo and all this, a million is nothing to them. Yeah. They can just attract a million just like that, no problem. Every year.

Jimmy
Right. Maybe they should have brought in some pandas.

Tin Seng
Yeah, it was not very popular. Pandas and all that. Yeah, pandas. You could do that. They brought in camels.

Jimmy
Oh my goodness.

Tin Seng
Yeah. But it didn’t work.

Jimmy
Okay.

Tin Seng
Yeah, it could be the whole entire idea set at that era. You mentioned, right? That fixed setting. Yeah. And that was not the selling point. And they could jet travel to China.

Jimmy
Yeah, so people would go to China directly, right?

Tin Seng
Yeah. See all these things. So China was already opened up. 1982, you have the Southern Tour already by Deng Xiaoping. In a way that China was really opening up slowly and they can go to the real city so why would they go to a replica?

Jimmy
Nowadays when we think of places in China or I think in Vietnam where they have replica like Eiffel Towers and replica of whatever, right? And you think, “Oh, okay. That’s a bit strange. Do I want to go there?”

Jimmy
I was gonna ask you actually about the terracotta warriors. So they weren’t part of the original plan, is it?

Tin Seng
No. Actually, they, because they’re trying to recreate this Xi’an, right? So Xi’an, the terracotta army.

Jimmy
Yeah, of course.

Tin Seng
It’s located there, right? So that is actually one of their main attractions. Yeah, they have the replicas, yeah. At the time of its opening, this gallery of these replica of this terracotta army – we have everything – the soldiers as well as the chariots. They were supposed to open, but it didn’t open. But anyway, yes, they have it underground.

Jimmy
Oh, you mean all these were underground?

Tin Seng
Yes, there’s an underground gallery.

Jimmy
Oh, I see.

Tin Seng
So quite a massive…

Jimmy
Presumably if it’s a tomb, it was buried underground. Okay. If you want to be realistic, you have to put it underground. But still.

Tin Seng
Perhaps that’s why it was not open. It took time. When the park was opened, 1982, it took them a while. Yeah. Took them a while. I think it opened roughly mid-’90s. Yeah.

Jimmy
So I have to say, reading your article, I wish that I had gone, because it sounds like it would’ve been fun. You don’t have to go there every weekend, but you go there once a year or something, and it’ll be quite fun and quite interesting.

Yeah. So clearly they were not doing very well. What did they do to reinvent themselves or boost visitors?

Tin Seng
By 1996, they have sold the place. And before that, okay, they did try, okay? They tried to turn it into this night-time food city.

Jimmy
Oh.

Tin Seng
Yeah. Offering local food this time. Local food.It’s free admission because when it was opened, it was reported that the admission fee was a bit too high.

So anyway, they make it free at night, and they also set up an entertainment centre there.

Jimmy
What do you mean by an entertainment centre?

Tin Seng
It was pretty wild. You have Canton pop discotheque.

Jimmy
Really?

Tin Seng
Yeah.

Jimmy
Okay.

Tin Seng
Yeah.

Jimmy
That doesn’t sound very Tang Dynasty-ish.

Tin Seng
Yeah. And yeah, and they set up this place showing this Shanghai movie place where they can watch Chinese classical movies.

Jimmy
Oh really?

Tin Seng
Yeah. And they also floated the idea of building a hotel there. Yeah. A huge hotel. Turn it into a place for conferences and meetings and stuff. Yeah.

Jimmy
All this sadly did not work. And I say sadly, because like I said, I wish I could now go there. So what happened in the end?

Tin Seng
What happened? Like I mentioned, it was sold to the Admiralty Resort Country Club. Yeah. They bought over, and again they tried to revive. They injected more street shows and stuff, but with a local flavour, local culture. And they also mentioned that they want to turn the whole place into a wedding centre.

Jimmy
Yeah, I think it would be nice for a wedding shoot, right?

Tin Seng
Yeah. And eventually build that hotel where they can have dinner, wedding dinner.

Jimmy
Yeah. Makes sense.

Tin Seng
Makes sense, right? Yeah. But it didn’t work out. Okay. Because by the time, it was already been branded as something that’s stale and outdated. About a year later, 1997, the Asian Financial Crisis.

Jimmy
And, yeah. Yes, Asian Financial Crisis, right?

Tin Seng
So yeah, a drop in tourism and economy problems. So, yeah, just do the math. They were actually making huge losses every year. So by 1999, it was gone. It closed down.

Jimmy
Okay, that makes sense. Yeah. I completely forgot about the Asian Financial Crisis, but yeah, that would’ve been a major factor in just killing off any kind of visitors with spare money.

Tin Seng
You just go and look at the visitorship numbers for other attractions at that time.

Jimmy
That makes sense. People don’t have a lot of disposable income. It sat vacant for a while, and bits of the sets were auctioned off, which was quite cool. I would’ve liked to have purchased a terracotta warrior for my apartment.

Tin Seng
Yeah. They were actually auctioned off.

Jimmy
Or a chariot or a horse.

Tin Seng
Yeah. And you can sit on it, right?

Jimmy
So what is the space now?

Tin Seng
So now they are building HDB estate. It’s part of the Jurong Lake District. Right. Yeah, so it’s a very promising kind of vision of turning Jurong into a place.

Jimmy
I like the new water features in Jurong, right? The new Jurong lakes and all that. It’s very pretty. I’ve walked around the place. I really like it. Yeah, so that was Tang Dynasty Village/City. To be honest, actually, I didn’t know that it had been renamed from a village to a city within a month of its launch. I keep calling it in my head Tang Dynasty Village. I think that was the name that... Their marketing was very good, but clearly a city is more impressive than a village.

I mentioned earlier in my introduction that you are BiblioAsia’s most prolific writer, so thank you very much for that. We really enjoy the stuff that you write for us because they’re all very well researched, and they all cover different things. What do you enjoy about archival research?

Tin Seng
As a librarian, we don’t just sit at the counter. Yeah, so we actually do a lot of research. And as time, as you spend more and more years in the library, you come across a lot of materials. Sometimes you do find an annual report that was published in the colonial times, or you chance upon some articles, or chance upon some materials, some building plans and stuff, and got yourself interested.

So I say, “Oh what’s this? Oh, wow, that’s very nice.” And from there, it grew in your head. There are places that you go. URA [Urban Redevelopment Authority], our City Gallery exhibitions, museums. You see a couple of things. You bring your kid around, and they ask questions, or sometimes you just stand at Kallang Park, and then you look at the place, and then you wonder, and then you say, “Oh, yeah, I knew this.” Then you tell your son.

So I told him that, “Do you know this place used to be a boatyard,” and things like that. And, and all this thing, he’ll say, “Oh, yeah. Really? Oh, okay. Like I care.”

Jimmy
How old is he?

Tin Seng
He’s a teenager. Oh, okay. Yeah. “Oh, you know how interesting it is?” “Oh, shut up.” Then you feel like you’re obliged to tell this story.

Jimmy
Okay.

Tin Seng
Then you start to build on it.

Jimmy
It sounds to me like it’s very much propelled by your own curiosity. You stumble upon an interesting fact or an event. Even though your son is not that interested, other people are, right?

Because I have to be honest, I didn’t know, uh, until that it was a place for repairing boats, right, in Kallang? So these are things that are interesting to some of us, and I’m actually glad that you have taken it upon yourself to look out for all these interesting, lesser-known aspects of Singapore’s history and done the work to bring them to life, right? Because it’s one thing to just say, “This used to be a boatyard”, but then you do the research and to pull out images and to get the stories behind. That one simple fact is actually a lot of work.

You’re also involved in something called Curiocity, right? It sounds very interesting. I’m curious about Curiocity.

Tin Seng
Yeah, Curiocity. It’s a website, okay, where we feature story maps. Story maps is like using maps. The idea is to use our digitised maps, but due to some technical problems, we are using the official OneMap.

But there are a lot of places in Singapore, and what we drop location pins, and from there, we pinpoint a place, and then we accompany that place with a narrative. And that narrative comes in the form of a photograph of that place, archival photograph, or anything else of that place and tells a story of the building, of that landmark.

The idea is to pick a small, little area or the whole entire island. Pick a topic and explore things that have been less explored. A map actually is quite deep, especially our archival map. You don’t look at it and say, “Oh, this is an old map. It shows some streets and stuff, and some squares, and all these things.” No, they’re actually more than that, because everything tells a story.

Jimmy
So it’s very much location based, it sounds. And your entry point is a map. You look at this map of Singapore, and you find a particular location, and you go deep into it, and then you pull the resources of the library and the archives to tell a story about that particular place or that particular street or that particular building.

So actually, it sounds very interesting, and I urge everyone to check out the Curiocity website, which is constantly growing. To go back to all the stuff that you’ve written for BiblioAsia, like I said, you’ve written on a whole bunch of different stories. Which is the story that you are most proud of?

Tin Seng
Yeah, that’s a difficult question. The Garden City one. Could [have been published] 10 years ago.

Jimmy
Okay. Wow.

Tin Seng
Because at that time, Gardens by the Bay, they were still building it. Yeah, they were still building it. And so I wrote about idea of tracing this green journey of Singapore from the time when former Prime Minister Mr Lee Kuan Yew, when he came out with the Garden City, and how it progresses from planting trees, building parks, build lots of parks.

And then after that, after it manifests into something else like park connector, and then it ended off with this Gardens by the Bay. Okay, that was the narrative back then. So when it was done, a lot of the research was not done yet. A lot of books were not published yet.

Jimmy
Oh really? I see.

Tin Seng
So after that, then it just happened that there was this... At that time, okay, it’s purely coincidence and stuff. And it could be because they roll out the more things, more related to it, and there was a huge growth in this literature on tracing our greening. And in the article, you can see that it was not really well developed yet because it was a new idea.

The colonial times, that idea of tree plantings was there but not really there. But actually, when I did deeper research, in fact, I did a journal article in JMBRAS [Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society]. And I found that actually back then, Botanic Gardens, the British, the municipality, they were already planting trees on the streets.

So the history is even longer, and they were talking about building parks. They were talking about creating open spaces because they realised that the place is just too overcrowded, and that explains a lot of things like why you have backstreets and stuff. They have this great improvement plan, and they try to open up more public parks, but it was, of course, not that well conceived yet.

There’s no this grand scheme of things, because after all, a colonial government and things like that, budget and stuff. So it’s a huge greening journey.

Jimmy
That’s very interesting. To be honest, I did not know that it went back so far. And I guess you were saying it, the reason you’re quite proud of it is because you worked on it at a time when there wasn’t a lot of literature on it. So I guess in some ways then after you worked on it, it could be a springboard for other people.

Tin Seng
I certainly do hope so.

Jimmy
And that’s what we hope, right? Because you do some research on something and it won’t be the last word, but it hopefully gives other people a chance to use that to go deeper into different particular areas, right?

Tin Seng
Yes.

Jimmy
I have to say my personal favourite story of yours is still Sarong Island. Okay. I think it’s so amazing that an this island existed and then stopped existing, and that you were able to discover that it had a wrong name. It was constantly referred to by its wrong name in the press, and you were able to sort it out.

And that to me is a tribute to the value that librarians can bring, right? The detailed research into different sources, maps. You went to the archive to look up not just maps, right? What else did you look into?

Tin Seng
Government gazette.u

Jimmy
Yeah, the Government gazettes and all that, and then compared, and then press reports, and then you were able to sort it out. And it’s a very interesting story. So that for me, I’m sorry, Tin Seng, about your Garden City piece, but I actually love your Sarong Island because I think it’s research that breaks new ground, as it were. And I really enjoyed it.

Tin Seng
Thank you very much.

Jimmy
Yeah. I’m sure your son is not impressed, but I think that you do a great job.

Tin Seng
Maybe one day he will.

Jimmy
Hopefully. We all hope that our children will one day be impressed with us. I wouldn’t hold my breath. My daughter is definitely not impressed with me. We’ve come to the end of the podcast. I really want to thank you for joining us. But before we go, I want to ask you, based on everything you’ve done for us, I’d like you to complete this sentence. Archival research is…

Tin Seng
It has to be one word?

Jimmy
You know, it doesn’t have to be. It can be like an entire 20 minutes.

Tin Seng
Archival research is when you heard that your research is on the radio, but without mentioning your name because they just chanced upon it.

Jimmy
Oh, really?

Tin Seng
If you tune in to One FM.

Jimmy
Okay.

Tin Seng
The morning show. Yeah, Flying Dutchman and Lavinia [Tan]. So when they have this segment at around 6.30 am, they have this “How Singaporean You Are”.

Jimmy
Okay.

Tin Seng
They actually get a lot of stuff from our [BiblioAsia website].

Jimmy
Oh, really?

Tin Seng
And this morning they were talking about Telok Ayer Basin.

Jimmy
All right. Okay.

Tin Seng
They asked a question. What was this place, Telok Ayer Basin? Where was it located? Yeah. The answer is pretty obvious. I know it’s off Shenton Way.

Jimmy
I was going say it was in Telok Ayer, but clearly…

Tin Seng
It’s off Shenton Way. And then she went on and explained that why it was a basin. And where they actually got the sand to reclaim. But this thing was actually in my land reclamation article.

Jimmy
Oh.

Tin Seng
I hope that’s where the information was. When I wrote that article on land reclamation in BiblioAsia, I have not read anything to explain why it was a basin. Yeah. Actually, it was actually a problem. They tried to reclaim, and the whole place sank.

Jimmy
Oh.

Tin Seng
Yeah. And they let it set, because they want to divert the whole entire, like, the vessel Singapore River to that area as a dock, right? Maybe my research has been used?

Jimmy
I think definitely. Just talk about that particular article. I know that Rachel Heng, in her novel, The Great Reclamation, she said to us in her interview, “Yeah, I read this piece on land reclamation in BiblioAsia, and that was, like, the, my starting point.” So yeah, I think that this is great, right? It is nice that you are helping to build a base on which others can build a foundation on which others can build something on.

Tin Seng
Yeah. In fact, it’s to say that that’s the value of National Library.

Jimmy
I think so.

Tin Seng
From our work, yeah, from everything, including yours, BiblioAsia.

Jimmy
Yes.

Tin Seng
Everything from your podcast to everything that every department does at our exhibition. There’s a lot of work behind it, and that’s our main strength, our National Library’s main strength.

Jimmy
I didn’t know it was going to be an ad for National Library, but I fully agree. Tin Seng, thank you very much for joining us on the BiblioAsia+ podcast. We’re really pleased that you could join us today. Tin Seng has written a very interesting story about the Tang Dynasty Village/City, and in BiblioAsia. It’s available in public libraries and the National Library and all that.

If for some reason everybody’s rushing to pick up their copies and there aren’t any available, you can always read it online. Thank you very much again, Tin Seng, and thank you everyone for listening, and do check us out on BiblioAsia.nlb.gov.sg. Thanks, Tin Seng.

Tin Seng
Okay, thank you.

[Music playing]

Jimmy
If you’ve enjoyed this episode, subscribe to this podcast and the BiblioAsia newsletter. Thanks for joining us on BiblioAsia+

Lim Tin Seng, “An Ancient Chinese City in Jurong,” BiblioAsia 22, no. 2 (July–September 2026).

Lim Tin Seng, “From Sarong Island with Love: Singapore’s Original Tourist Isle,” BiblioAsia 18, no. 3 (October–December 2022).

Lim Tin Seng, “From Botanic Gardens to Gardens by the Bay: Singapore’s Experience in Becoming a Garden City,” BiblioAsia 8, no. 2 (July–September 2012).

This episode of BiblioAsia Podcast was hosted by Jimmy Yap and produced by Soh Gek Han. Sound engineering was done by Red Ink Media. The background music "Di Tanjong Katong" was composed by Ahmad Patek and performed by Chords Haven. Special thanks to Tin Seng for coming on the show.

Produced by the National Library Singapore, the BiblioAsia Podcast tells stories about Singapore history.