Chinatown

Singapore's Chinatown is a grid of painted shophouses — shutters, tiles, a covered walkway five feet wide — where the city's founding communities were told to live and where its faiths still stand on the same block: a Hindu temple of 1827 with a gopuram of gods on the corner, a Hokkien temple of 1839 built by sailors without a single nail, and a Buddhist temple of 2007 that keeps a tooth. Between them, the hawker centres, where a plate of chicken rice costs less than the coffee that follows it and one stall of soya-sauce chicken holds a Michelin star; and, up the little hill of Ann Siang, the shophouses have become bars.

The traveller comes by the purple line and walks Pagoda Street through the souvenirs to Sri Mariamman, shoes off, then down South Bridge Road to the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple, up its floors to the roof garden; eats at Maxwell — chicken rice, the queue that moves — or at the Chinatown Complex upstairs, the largest in the country, where Hawker Chan still serves his star for three dollars; walks Telok Ayer to Thian Hock Keng and imagines the shore that used to be there; climbs Ann Siang Hill at dusk for a drink on a five-foot way; and, with time, crosses to the Pinnacle for the sky bridge on the fiftieth floor and Chinatown seen whole from above.

The Guide's honesty: Chinatown is a heritage district in a city that plans everything, and it shows — the streets are clean, the stalls are graded, and Pagoda Street is mostly for visitors: turn one corner for the real thing —; hawker centres are cash-first, self-service and honest, and the rule is that a packet of tissues on a table means it is taken; temples ask for covered shoulders and knees and are free; Singapore is humid all year and the afternoon storm is on schedule — the covered walkways are for that; and the city fines what it says it will fine. Eat, walk, look up at the shutters, and let the block do the talking.