28-Oct-2020
Since our release from covid-purdah, we've been enthusiastically following up some aspects of Kuching heritage.
The Borneo Post recently reported:
"The Kuching Old Bazaar area will be revamped and relaunched in five months by February next year..., said Tourism, Arts and Culture Minister Datuk Abdul Karim Rahman Hamzah...
"He revealed that within the Kuching Old Bazaar area, there are around 200 traditional shophouses...
"He added that being in the center of old Kuching district, there were rapid changes in recent years with old traditional trades disappearing and many old residents slowly moving out from the area, and thus, there was a need to preserve and conserve tradition and heritage and at the same time rejuvenate the area.
"He said his ministry plans to revamp the Kuching Old Bazaar to be on the same level with Singapore’s Chinatown, Penang’s George Town and Melaka’s Jonker Walk."
Hmmm... Well, certainly, change is coming. And definitely some of these venerable old houses need a bit of help. As the picture at the top indicates, they can be difficult to maintain.
So I shouldn't jump to bad conclusions. According to the article, this is a bottom-up rather than a top-down initiative, and the associated goal of recording the stories of residents and compiling a collection of photos is also a really good one.
Presumably the five-month time-frame also precludes the kind of ground-up beautification and gentrification programme that in some locales has turned vibrant old areas into little more than tourist theme parks.
So we'll see... The "cultural mapping" programme will also be extended to our beloved Jalan Padungan, giving us all the more reason to hope for the successful realization of the good bits without any of the downsides that have afflicted other such schemes.
An example of a spruced-up shophouse... This is Little Hainan@Padungan, where we ate today (more on the food in another post)
We've always been aware, as we've padded the streets of Kuching, that it has a plethora of, if not heritage, then certainly handsome houses. Here are just two more examples of many:
And there are interesting public buildings too.
One source gives the early 1970s for the construction of the MBKS swimming pool, but I haven't been able to verify that elsewhere
We can see the Civic Centre, opened in 1988, from our flat
There used to be a Planetarium here, but it's been shut for a while
So many questions here. What do you build in a city, and why? What do you preserve, and how?