The literal translation of the Malay words, kereta-api is vehicle-fire. Presumably, the term was coined when a train was powered by coal and had a furnace.

It was the test of a mother’s strength to give a child away so that he would have a better life than to keep him with her to suffer their poverty.

Some people credited modern Singapore’s British founder, Sir Stamford Raffles, with the idea of creating these open corridors under the first floor of a building to shield people from the tropical sun and the onslaught of heavy rain. Others credited Alexander Laurie Johnston for its design. He had been a prominent merchant who came to Singapore in 1852. Whoever gave birth to the concept, he was ingenious. All newly erected buildings had to provide this mode of shelter. As the width of these passage-ways was approximately five feet, they came to be called five-foot-way, and this came to characterise the architecture of shophouses.