Bugis Street: Where You Shop Your Own Singapore

Bugis Street, the great shopping street in the city-state of Singapore, is globally renowned as a great tourist destination. It is spread across a widespread area that was generally referred to as Xiao Po or the Little Slope in the past, by the Chinese community. Xiao Po extended all the way from Tanjong Pagar to the Jalan Sultan, covering the old Singapore. In old days, that is during the 1950s, this Xiao Po used to teem with traders and merchants, making the place one of the liveliest economic zones of Singapore. It was an ideal place to get some affordable goods at more than affordable prices, and hawker food. There was little sophistication in the ambience. The nights in Xiao Pao were frequented by American GIs, foreign sailors and transvestites, and the atmosphere used to get painted with carnal colours.

Today, the place has been revamped and now in the Bugis Street one can find sheltered walkways and properly air-conditioned shopping spaces. With shopping malls, fancy restaurants and nightlife entertainment options, today it has evolved as a dazzling retail complex. It has dispensed with its seamy and the steamy side.

But despite the sleekness nothing much has changed really. Still Bugis Street remains the best place in Singapore to indulge in a street shopping experience. Today, there are around six hundred stalls in the Bugis Street offering an eclectic blend of stylish, cool and trendy street wear. Besides these, beauty services, hawker food and cafes, etc. make up the ambience. Probably one of the most vibrant and lively places in the whole of Singapore, Bugis Street still retains its idiosyncratic street shopping sense.