What Was Toa Payoh Before Toa Payoh? | Swamps, Kampongs, Squatters and the HDB Model Town

SINGAPORE / ESTATE HISTORY / TOA PAYOH

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By The Memory desk · Historical reference · Sources checked 7 October 2026

Before it became Singapore’s first town planned entirely by the Housing and Development Board, Toa Payoh was a broad stretch of swamp and forest north of the city, cleared in the nineteenth century for gambier and pepper and later filled with kampongs, farms and small workshops. An 1842 map shows the area as mainly forest and swamp. By 1855 it held 15 plantation clearings, and by the mid-1950s around 21,000 people lived there in attap and zinc-roofed houses. Clearance for the new town ran through the early 1960s, and the first flats were balloted in October 1966.

Most accounts of Toa Payoh history begin with the blocks. This one ends roughly where they start. It covers the name, the plantation economy, the villages that officials called a squatter district, and the long argument over compensation that held up the bulldozers. The later story of the shops, cinemas and HDB Hub is told in our history of Toa Payoh Town Centre and HDB Hub.

Toa Payoh before HDB at a glance

Location	Central Singapore, east of Thomson Road and north of Balestier; the old district also took in parts of today’s Bishan, Caldecott, Potong Pasir, Bidadari and Novena
Name	“Big swamp”: Hokkien and Teochew toa (big) with payoh, from the Malay paya (swamp)
Early maps	1842 (forest and swamp); labelled Toah Pyoh Chui Kow by 1846
Before the new town	Gambier and pepper estates, then Chinese, Malay and Indian kampongs, vegetable farms and cottage industries
Landmark older than the town	Lian Shan Shuang Lin Monastery, founded 1898 by Low Kim Pong
New town begun	Earthworks 1964; first flats balloted October 1966
Today	A mature HDB town; the National Heritage Board’s Toa Payoh Heritage Trail marks its older sites

Why is it called Toa Payoh?

The usual explanation joins the Hokkien and Teochew word toa, meaning big, to payoh, a Chinese rendering of the Malay paya, or swamp. The National Heritage Board adds a second, related account from an 1849 article in the Singapore Free Press, which described Chinese settlers laying large tree trunks across marshy ground to make paths called pyoh, with toah marking the larger ones. Either way, the name describes wet, difficult ground rather than a person or a village.

The maps agree. An 1842 survey shows the district as mostly forest and swamp with a few scattered clearings, and an 1846 map labels it Toah Pyoh Chui Kow. That older Toa Payoh was much larger than the present town: the Heritage Board’s trail notes that it took in land now known as Bishan, Caldecott, Bukit Brown, Potong Pasir, Bidadari and Novena. This is why the histories of neighbouring districts, from Bishan’s cemetery hills to Novena’s hospitals and churches, keep running into one another.

1840s to 1900s: gambier, pepper and the Chin Choon estate

The swamp was opened up by the gambier and pepper boom that pushed planters inland from the town in the mid-nineteenth century. A Municipal Committee report of 1855 counted 15 clearings in Toa Payoh holding about 355,000 gambier plants, 38,800 pepper vines and 2,190 nutmeg trees, worked by 127 labourers. Those figures describe a patchwork of holdings cut into the forest rather than one great estate.

The best-known landowner was Seah Eu Chin, the Teochew merchant often called the king of gambier and pepper. According to the heritage trail, one of his Toa Payoh plantations, Chin Choon, grew gambier in the nineteenth century and rubber in the early twentieth, and included a large bungalow named E-Choon. Life for the workers was harsh. Seah’s own account from 1848 describes men injured while splitting wood, opium dependence, and only one or two in ten completing their three-year contracts. Wages of around $3 to $4 a month rose and fell with crop prices.

The district’s first lasting institution arrived at the end of the century. Lian Shan Shuang Lin Monastery was founded in 1898 by Low Kim Pong, a Hokkien merchant who had come from Fujian in 1858 and made his money in medicinal herbs, and who contributed the land. Building began in 1902. Sources differ on when it was finished: the National Library gives 1907, the Heritage Board says it was complete by 1908, and 1909 is also widely repeated. Its halls rose among farms and swamp, and they were gazetted as a National Monument on 14 October 1980.

The kampong years: Puay Teng Keng, bean curd and the “Chicago of Singapore”

As plantation agriculture faded in the early twentieth century, villages and vegetable farms took over the land. Most were Chinese and grouped loosely by dialect. The largest, Kampong Puay Teng Keng, took its name from the Chee Tian Keng temple and had a market of about 30 stalls and its own firefighting team keeping watch over the wooden houses. Other village names in the record include Kampong Hup Choon Hng, Or Kio, Ann Siang Sua and Kampong Potong Pasir. Malay households were concentrated around Boon Teck Road and Kampong Pasiran, and Indian cattle herders from Potong Pasir came into Toa Payoh to sell milk.

The land was productive but poorly served. In 1954 the Singapore Improvement Trust called it the most fertile land on the island. Its laterite roads, however, became impassable in heavy rain, and a single public standpipe could serve hundreds of households, with queues that lasted from 20 minutes to more than an hour. Small industry thrived regardless: an HDB survey in 1961 found 101 small manufacturers, 55 of them making soya bean curd, alongside glassworks, rattan workshops, potteries and joss-stick makers.

There was a rougher side, and it produced the district’s most quoted nickname. Secret-society activity earned Toa Payoh the label “Chicago of Singapore”, after the American city’s gangsters. The heritage trail records illicitly distilled liquor, a gang known as the “18”, and police patrols that avoided the villages for fear of having their tyres shot out. In our reading, the nickname describes one part of village life rather than the whole of it; the same sources record farms, temples, a busy market and a volunteer fire team.

1954 to 1963: the squatter label and the fight over clearance

Planners saw the district very differently from the people who lived there. In 1954 the Singapore Improvement Trust began building flats around Kim Keat Road and drew up plans for a Toa Payoh estate to house 65,000 people. A 1955 Trust estimate put about 21,000 residents in attap and zinc-roofed houses, and a 1959 Trust report called the area an “extensive notorious squatter district”. To officials, the absence of formal titles and approvals was the defining fact; to residents, these were homes, farms and businesses built up over decades.

Resistance was organised early. From the mid-1950s the Singapore Country People’s Association and the Singapore Rural Residents’ Association ran protests and sit-ins demanding better compensation on behalf of some 20,000 farmers and settlers. In 1955 residents attacked a demolition squad, and later clearance work needed police protection. When the newly formed HDB took up Toa Payoh as a major estate of about 600 acres (243 hectares), negotiations with around 3,000 squatter families dragged on through 1961 and 1962 as residents held out for higher compensation.

The deadlock broke in stages. HDB offered cash compensation, resettlement at Sembawang or Lim Chu Kang, or a place in its flats, and it built 192 single-storey, three-room terrace houses at Kim Keat Road, given free to villagers who accepted, at a land rent of $5 a month. The National Library links the September 1962 merger referendum to the weakening of organised resistance, and residents began accepting offers in early 1963. That October the government deregistered both associations, describing them as political organisations agitating for the Communists. By the end of 1963 about 40.5 hectares of kampong land had been cleared.

1964 to 1973: levelling hills for Singapore’s first HDB-planned town

Earthworks began early in 1964, on an industrial scale. Hills were cut down and some six million tonnes of earth were moved, with about 60 lorries a day carrying 4,000 tonnes over a Bailey bridge to reclaim land at the Kallang Basin. Work on the first blocks started late in 1964, and in October 1966 the first 720 flats were balloted: two-room units at $6,000 and three-room units at $7,500, for families earning no more than $1,000 a month.

Toa Payoh was Singapore’s second satellite town, after Queenstown, but the first that HDB conceived and developed itself. Planner Alan Choe led its design, and published estimates of its intended population range from 150,000 to 250,000. Block 53, the Y-shaped, 19-storey “VIP Block”, was completed in 1967 and became the stop for visiting dignitaries, Queen Elizabeth II among them in 1972. In August 1973 four new 25-storey point blocks opened as the Games Village for the 7th SEAP Games, housing about 1,500 athletes and officials; the flats were balloted to the public afterwards. How the town centre then reshaped everyday shopping is covered in our wider history of HDB town centres and heartland malls.

What survives of pre-HDB Toa Payoh today

Almost none of the kampong fabric remains, but several threads can still be followed on foot as of October 2026. Lian Shan Shuang Lin Monastery stands at the edge of the town, its older halls a National Monument. The United Temple, completed in 1974, gathered five kampong-era temples into one compound, among them Chee Tian Keng, the temple that gave Puay Teng Keng its name. At Block 177, a ficus revered in village days as a shen shu, or deity tree, is said to have resisted attempts to remove it, and a shrine to Guan Yin was set up beside it in 1969.

The new town has since produced heritage of its own. The dragon playground at Lorong 6, designed by HDB architect Khor Ean Ghee and built in 1979, is one of the last of its kind in Singapore. The Heritage Board’s Toa Payoh Heritage Trail, launched in 2014 and refreshed in March 2023, links these sites and is the simplest way to walk the story. For the neighbouring district to the south-west, see what Balestier was before Balestier.

A Toa Payoh timeline

• 1842: A map shows the district as mainly forest and swamp.
• 1846: A map labels it Toah Pyoh Chui Kow.
• 1855: A Municipal Committee report counts 15 clearings with gambier, pepper and nutmeg.
• 1898: Low Kim Pong founds Lian Shan Shuang Lin Monastery; building runs from 1902 to about 1907–08.
• 1955: The Trust estimates about 21,000 residents; a demolition squad is attacked.
• 1959: A Trust report calls Toa Payoh an “extensive notorious squatter district”.
• 1963: Residents begin accepting offers; the two rural associations are deregistered in October.
• 1964: Earthworks begin; the first blocks are started late in the year.
• October 1966: The first 720 flats are balloted.
• 1967: Block 53, the “VIP Block”, is completed.
• 1972: Queen Elizabeth II visits.
• 1973: Four point blocks serve as the SEAP Games Village.
• 1974: The United Temple brings five kampong temples together.
• 1979: The dragon playground is built at Lorong 6.
• 14 October 1980: Lian Shan Shuang Lin Monastery is gazetted as a National Monument.

Questions people ask

What does Toa Payoh mean?

“Big swamp”. Toa means big in Hokkien and Teochew, and payoh comes from the Malay paya, swamp. An 1849 newspaper also linked pyoh to timber paths laid across marshy ground.

What was Toa Payoh before HDB?

Swamp and forest, then gambier and pepper plantations from the mid-nineteenth century, and later kampongs, vegetable farms and small factories. Around 21,000 people lived there in the mid-1950s.

Why was Toa Payoh called the “Chicago of Singapore”?

Because of secret-society activity in the kampong years, including gang clashes and illicit liquor. The nickname compared the area to Chicago’s gangster reputation.

When was Toa Payoh new town built?

Clearance took place in the early 1960s, earthworks began in 1964, and the first 720 flats were balloted in October 1966. Building continued through the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Is Toa Payoh the first HDB town?

It was the second satellite town after Queenstown, but the first planned and developed entirely by HDB. Queenstown had been started by the Singapore Improvement Trust.

Sources and further reading

• National Heritage Board: Toa Payoh Heritage Trail booklet (trail launched 2014)
• National Heritage Board: Refreshed Toa Payoh Heritage Trail, media release (2023)
• National Library Board, Infopedia: Toa Payoh New Town (2014)
• National Library Board, Infopedia: Lian Shan Shuang Lin Monastery (2014)
• National Library Board, BiblioAsia: The 1973 SEAP Games in Singapore (2024)
• National Heritage Board, Roots: Toa Payoh Dragon Playground

This is a historical reference; heritage sites and access arrangements can change, so check before you visit. Read next: What Bishan was before Bishan · Toa Payoh Town Centre and HDB Hub · Back to The Memory