February 01, 2021
Yang Kaiheng, right, the force behind The Royal Singapore, with the company’s chief executive and creative director, Tham Why Keen.
South China Morning Post
Every week, media company The Royal Singapore puts up two to three videos on its Facebook page. The content often revolves around feel-good stories of ordinary people doing upbeat things, and celebrations of grit and determination.
There is the funeral director who conducts pro bono funeral services for elderly folks who die alone, and the hairdresser who gives free haircuts to loitering teens in her neighbourhood.
The man behind The Royal Singapore, Yang Kaiheng, 32, said he was compelled to start the media outfit because he wanted to inject more positivity into Singapore’s social media scene – a trait he finds lacking in cyberspace, where haters and trolls thrive.
23 12 2020
Unlike many other cities around the world where “Chinatowns” exist, a “Chinatown” in Singapore where three in four of its population are ethnic Chinese does seem rather odd.
The roots of the Chinese quarter do of course lie in Singapore’s very first urban plan, the so-called Jackson Plan of 1822, hatched at a time when the settlement was still very much in its infancy. That plan, placed the main settlement for migrants from China in the area where Chinatown is today also had a “Chuliah campong” for settlers from the Indian sub-continent adjacent to it. To the Chinese speaker, Chinatown had long been known as Tua Poh (大坡) or “the greater town”, or Ngau Che Shui or Gu Chia Chwee (牛车水) a reference to bullock-drawn water carts carrying supplies of fresh water to the settlement in its early days. It is perhaps in recent times that the notion of the former settlement being Chinatown has taken root, and this seems rather iron