Alkaff Mansion

Alkaff Mansion is a 19th-century colonial bungalow located on a hill at 10 Telok Blangah Green and is located within the Telok Blangah Hill Park. Built in 1918 by a member of the prominent Alkaff family as a weekend house, it became known for hosting high society parties in the 1930s. After World War 2, the house was abandoned. The mansion served as the headquarters of the World Buddhist Society from around 1970 to 1984 before it was redeveloped into a restaurant and party venue in the 1990s. The property was then returned to the government in 2004 upon closure of the restaurant. Left vacant for a number of years, the mansion was given a new lease of life when an Italian restaurant occupied the premises in 2011, until it ceased operations in 2016. As of today, the mansion remains vacated and under the care of the Singapore Land Authority.

Before 1916

The area known as Telok Blangah Hill today was known as Mount Washington in the early 20th Century. A European house was already constructed on the site surrounded by rubber and coconut trees before the plot of land was purchased by Syed Abdul Rahman bin Abdullah Alkaff in 1916.

1918 - 1930s

In 1918, the mansion with its distinctive architecture was constructed. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the mansion hosted many social functions that included people of various races and social classes. These functions had a role in strengthening inter-communal bonds. In 1930, a newspaper report mentions that the mansion was used by an organization called the “Young Arabs” to host a team of amateur Malay footballers who recently won the 1930 Singapore Cup. This event was explicitly reported to be one hosted to help relieve Arab-Malay tensions and bolster Muslim solidarity following a recent misunderstanding.

In 1936, the Chinese community, through the Chinese Consul General, made full use of the building to host a visiting general and provincial governor from China. In this function, a dinner was held and attended by people of various linguistic groups (to the point of necessitating a translator). A press conference was also held, whereby the Chinese governor expressed his “appreciation of the unity of the Chinese in Singapore”. These events which cut across racial lines are significant as they call into question the theories of Colonial scholar John Sydenham Furnivall, who argued that British ruled colonial societies were ‘plural societies’ – societies divided along communal lines that only converged at the market place, or in violence and instability once the ambit of British colonial power was gone. The various communities, far from being totally segregated met at the mansion, and such meetings were entirely spontaneous without explicit support of the British. The antecedents of “racial and religious harmony” which dominates race discourse in present-day Singapore, thus found expression in the mansion.

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Wikipedia