Buddha Tooth Relic Temple

The Buddha Tooth Relic Temple is a five-storey Tang Dynasty-style Buddhist temple in the heart of Chinatown that was built in 2007 but looks and feels centuries old — a testament to the meticulous scholarship and craftsmanship that went into recreating the architectural vocabulary of 7th-century Chinese Buddhism in a 21st-century building. The temple houses what is claimed to be a tooth relic of the Buddha, discovered in a collapsed stupa in Myanmar in 1980 and enshrined here in a 420-kilogram gold stupa on the fourth floor.

The temple's interior is a progression from the public to the sacred. The ground floor is a main prayer hall with a 15-foot seated Buddha. The second and third floors house the Buddhist Culture Museum, which displays several hundred Buddhist artifacts in a well-curated exhibition that explains the religion's history, symbolism, and regional variations. The fourth floor contains the Sacred Light Hall, where the tooth relic is displayed in its gold stupa — the gold was donated by devotees and weighs as much as a grand piano.

The rooftop garden is the unexpected pleasure — a terrace garden with a 10,000-Buddha prayer wheel, orchids, and views across the Chinatown roofscape that provide a moment of calm above the street-level commercial intensity. The temple is free, air-conditioned (a significant attraction in Singapore's heat), and welcomes visitors of all backgrounds. The vegetarian restaurant on the ground floor serves simple meals that are popular with the Chinatown lunch crowd.