Haw Par Villa

Haw Par Villa is the strangest attraction in Singapore — a hillside theme park built in 1937 by the Aw brothers (creators of Tiger Balm) featuring over 1,000 statues and dioramas depicting scenes from Chinese mythology, Confucian moral tales, and the Ten Courts of Hell, rendered in a style that ranges from folk art to fever dream. The park is free, rarely crowded, and unlike anything else in Singapore or anywhere else.

The Ten Courts of Hell is the main event — an underground walkway through ten chambers depicting the punishments awaiting sinners in Chinese Buddhist mythology, illustrated with graphic dioramas of people being sawn in half, ground by millstones, disembowelled by demons, and thrown into boiling oil. The scenes are presented with the cheerful grotesquerie of a village carnival rather than the solemnity of a religious exhibit, and the combination of moral instruction and creative violence has been traumatising Singaporean schoolchildren since the 1950s.

The rest of the park is less terrifying but equally peculiar — statues of Journey to the West characters, scenes from Chinese folklore involving crabs fighting humans, a giant gorilla for no apparent reason, and moral tableaux that explain Confucian values through painted plaster figures frozen in attitudes of virtue or vice. The park has been renovated but deliberately retains its original aesthetic — kitschy, didactic, and deeply sincere — and visiting it provides a window into a version of Chinese popular culture that has largely disappeared elsewhere.