The Strange and Silly at Haw Par Villa

It's strange.

It's frightening.

There’s nothing like spending your day off exploring the paint peeled edifices of a run down theme park, created by self made millionaires answering to no one.  There’s something about crumbling theme parks and frivolous spending that excites me.  For those of you in Asia, you may be familiar with the apparently magical properties of Tiger Balm, a muscle cream.  The two men who invented it, Aw Boon Haw and Aw Boon Par, made gigantic amounts of money on the aforementioned balm.  One of these brothers, wanting to build a mansion, bought a tract of coastal land in south western Singapore.

Now, when you have a lot of money, and nothing to spend it on, some pretty weird stuff can happen.  For most of us, if we want to be heard, we’ll talk to our neighbour, the editor, or the internet.  But, when you have a lot of money, and you want to spread a message, you have an invariably limitless opportunity to do so.  Deciding that traditional Chinese values weren’t being propagated, our two brothers decided to build a park designed entirely to do just that.  They built their theme park -- note: not an amusement park -- to raise awareness of traditional tales and legends of Chinese morality.  Education can’t be all fun...  

Built in 1937, Haw Par Villa has many recreated scenes and exhibits mostly drawn from Confucianism and traditional Chinese folklore.  Let’s face it; everyday folklore can be have some nasty bits (see Little Red Riding Hood) and the theme park spares no exception.  Inside, you’ll see dramatic battle scenes, a massive one tonne grinning gorilla, mythological creatures ranging from frightening to farcical, a tepid turtle pond, and the coupe de grace: the violent Ten Courts of Hell.  Inside are dramatic representations of the consequences of leading an immoral life: if you are ungrateful, you will have your “heart cut out,” or, if you are a drug trafficker or a tomb robber, you will be “tied to red hot copper and grilled.”  

I had been recommended to go here by a Singaporean friend after I told her I was tired of seeing boring tourist sites.  Right away, she said this was a strange place to see.  Thinking that strange was subjective, and at best I could catch up on some folklore and legend, off I went.  She was not kidding: the place is really strange!  Years of mismanagement and plummeting ticket revenue have left it in a sorry state.  As I walked up to the gate, no one was there to charge me (free admission!).  Inside, I saw about eight other people, and two of them may have been workers.  The broken steps, the peeling paint, the overgrown weeds, and the sludge in the turtle pond are all evidence of the park’s sorry decline.  Wandering around this half abandoned park, I couldn’t help but burst out in laughter at some dioramas and stare in bewilderment at others.  The eerie emptiness that pervaded the park made me want to hurry through and get out of there, but I made sure to read each sign so that the founders could rest in peace.


When I told two friends where I had gone, they were shocked.  Both had been taken as young children to see the vicious depictions in order to learn about proper morality -- and proper punishment!  It seems the Boon Brothers’ dream lives on.  There’s nothing like a dismembered corpse to teach children not to spread rumours!

Batman, Spiderman...   Turtleman?