Eu Yan Sang Building

In 1879, Eu Kong opened a small medicine shop in the tin-mining town of Gopeng, in what is now Malaysia, and named it Yan Sang, meaning “caring for mankind.” His customers were Chinese miners, many of them addicted to opium. His only son, Eu Tong Sen, expanded the business across Malaya, opening a medical hall wherever he opened a mine, and eventually added the family name to the sign. In Singapore, that name went up on a row of four three-storey shophouses on South Bridge Road, dated 1910 and designed by Alfred Bidwell of Swan & Maclaren, the architect behind the Raffles Hotel.

The building served as Eu Yan Sang’s first Singapore medical hall and remained a Chinatown fixture for more than a century. Eu Tong Sen, meanwhile, branched into rubber, banking, property, and remittances, and reportedly held interests in the opium revenue farms of Singapore and Penang, an arrangement that supplied the habit his shops had been founded to treat. A nearby street still bears his name. In 2023 the shophouses reopened as a co-working space, decorated with apothecary-style drawers and topped with a rooftop bar. The drawers are now purely ornamental. The bar is not.