A few stops north of Jurong East interchange, in the northwest of Singapore, is Choa Chu Kang MRT station. Since a few years linked to the automated Light Rail Transit (LRT) with small rail cars running on elevated roads, it’s a station of much importance to the approximately 140,000 inhabitants of the area called Choa Chu Kang.
Choa Chu Kang or 蔡厝港 (càicuògǎng) in Mandarin stems from the Teochew dialect. In the early days, the area was a rural area where Chinese immigrants planted gambier (an herb used in Western and Chinese medicine, as well as for coloring) and pepper along the banks of the rivers.
‘Kang’ means ‘river’ in Teochew, ‘chu’ means ‘lord’. So it refers to the headman that was in charge of the plantations at the time.
‘Choa’ is the clan name of the first headman. So ‘Choa Chu Kang’ as a whole stands for ‘headman Choa’.
