From the archive record
Orchard Road had its humble origins as an unnamed country road lined with fruit orchards, nutmeg plantations, and pepper farms in the early 1830s. By the 1850s, the plantations began to make way for residential development, and the street was soon home to Jewish and Buddhist cemeteries, Hindu temples, outdoor hawker centres, wet markets, and even an open-air laundry basin. The first signs of retail transformation came only in 1903 with the establishment of Singapore's very first cold storage supermarket, on the site now occupied by The Centrepoint. Orchard Road's first department store was set up by a local merchant, C. K. Tang, in 1958 on an isolated plot of land facing a cemetery. When the old C. K. Tang building was demolished in 1982, it was replaced by the high-rise Tang Plaza which