History
Pasir Panjang Road, which once hugged the coastline, was laid down as far as the Jurong River by John Turnbull Thomson by 1850. Thomson was Government Surveyor of Singapore from 1841 to 1853.
In 1910, the Government took over the opium industry and a state-owned factory was established at Pasir Panjang. In the 1920s, many of the wealthy Chinese built holiday and residential bungalows along the coast, some of which are still visible today in this area. In 1930, some of the Malay families from the Kallang River Basin area were resettled here when Kallang Airport was constructed. In 1957, the Malay settlement here became known as the West Coast Malay Settlement. Right up till the early 1960s, this area contained many Malay fishing villages.
Since the late 1960s, the whole length of the coast, from the Singapore River to Jurong, has been reclaimed for wharves, almost entirely devoted to containerisation. The coastal area at Pasir Panjang has also been extensively reclaimed for the Pasir Panjang Terminal of the Port of Singapore.
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“All things are moral. That soul, which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspiration; out there in history we can see its fatal strength.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The best history is but like the art of Rembrandt; it casts a vivid light on certain selected causes, on those which were best and greatest; it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)