Etymology and History
The area of Cantonment Road was the site assigned by Stamford Raffles in 1819 in his directions to Major William Farquhar for barracks for the East India Company's Sepoy troops. The contingent of Indian sepoys stationed here had accompanied Raffles to Singapore and were asked to stay. Cantonment refers to a group of lodgings assigned to troops, hence the name of the road. British troops were "cantoned" here between 1824 and 1858. Prior to 1853, Outram Road was also part of Cantonment Road.
The Cantonese refer to the road as ba suo wei or pa so bue, meaning "end of Bukit Pasoh".
Raffles intended this area for hospitals, magazines, barracks of the army, houses for civil and military offices of the East India Company, as well as godowns and offices for the government. In 1822, however, Raffles found that his vision for the Cantonment Plain was violated. The space reserved exclusively for public purposes was occupied by European merchants in masonry buildings.
A landmark on Cantonment Road is the Sri Manmatha Karunya Eswarar Temple, located near the Tanjong Pagar Railway Station, which had its origins in the 1940s as a modest wooden shed-like structure set up to serve the large Hindu community working in and living near the shipyards. It was rebuilt in 1987.
Read more about this topic: Cantonment Road, Singapore
Famous quotes containing the words etymology and/or history:
“Semantically, taste is rich and confusing, its etymology as odd and interesting as that of “style.” But while style—deriving from the stylus or pointed rod which Roman scribes used to make marks on wax tablets—suggests activity, taste is more passive.... Etymologically, the word we use derives from the Old French, meaning touch or feel, a sense that is preserved in the current Italian word for a keyboard, tastiera.”
—Stephen Bayley, British historian, art critic. “Taste: The Story of an Idea,” Taste: The Secret Meaning of Things, Random House (1991)
“It gives me the greatest pleasure to say, as I do from the bottom of my heart, that never in the history of the country, in any crisis and under any conditions, have our Jewish fellow citizens failed to live up to the highest standards of citizenship and patriotism.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)