If you don’t happen to live in the Northeast, you may not have been there, but Hougang MRT is a pretty busy station in the heartlands (main residential areas) of Singapore. Its name, written as 后港 (Hòu găng) in Mandarin, stems from the Hokkien/Teochew “Aū-káng” which means “river end”. There used to be a well at what is now Hougang Street 21; which explains the name “river end”.
Not that long ago, the area that now has some 40,000 housing units used to be an area of forested land, where pig farming was one of the main activities. Many of the inhabitants of present day Hougang are Teochew Chinese, since most of the inhabitants used to live in the village Kampong Punggol, which was mainly a Teochew community.
