People today can try their give at colouring traditional Peranakan tiles in addition to making bracelets in Chinatown this weekend because the Chinatown Business Association (CBA) attempts to draw the crowds to the once bustling area.
Shops and eateries within the heritage site were hit badly by dramatic fall in tourist numbers over the past few months amid the Covid-19 pandemic in addition to travel restrictions.
To encourage locals to arrive at the area, the CBA has organised an array of workshops where visitors will be shown steps to make Chinese knotted bracelets, grow their vegetables and herbs, and also colour Peranakan tiles by using markers.
Booths have been established in Sago Street pertaining to these activities, with attendance capped at groups involving five. Other attractions include old-school games just like hopscotch and snakes along with ladders.
CBA executive director Lim Yick Suan said she hoped those activities would "increase domestic targeted traffic to Chinatown, strengthening its position being a cultural, heritage-rich hot spot".
She added that Covid-19 preventive measures will be in place. These include temperature taking, safe distancing and occasional cleaning of workshop equipment.
Ms Amelia Tay, 34, is among those keen to go to the area over the actual weekend, saying that she'll be taking her five-year-old daughter, Andrea, to Chinatown this kind of weekend.
"It'll be fun to expose her towards the games I used to play during a vacation and hopefully she will learn something from the workshops, " Ms Tay stated.
These heritage-themed activities form component to a monthly line-up with events in Chinatown.
A compilation of "wellness workshops" is tentatively slated for next month, where herbal tea tenants will share the health benefits of their remedies.
But not everyone is convinced about the efficacy of these incidents.
Mr Lucas Tok, lecturer in addition to marketing competency lead on Singapore Polytechnic's Business University, said that businesses inside area have to lower their reliance on traveler dollars and reach out instead to locals through e-commerce platforms as long as they hope to survive.
"Places like Tiong Bahru and Keong Saik can bring in locals with no losing their rich heritage and they may be seen as a method of how Chinatown could evolve, " he mentioned
The CBA declined to reveal what number of Chinatown stores have shut down since January, or what steps retail sales have fallen compared with the same period 2009. But a handful of street vendors and retailers contacted from the Straits Times said product sales had plunged by at least 50 per cent seeing that travel restrictions were added.
Ms Jane Yee, SIXTY, a storekeeper at Feng Shui Practitioner, said the shop offering souvenirs and religious paraphernalia for the past 16 years would close inside a month or two.
"We making the effort to cut our losses by selling the remaining stock at 50 per cent discount, " she reported in Mandarin.
Ms Wang Shan Shan, 36, any waitress at hotpot skewers diner Li Ji Chuan Chuan Xiang, said business had dropped by 50 percent when the tourists gave up on coming.
Mr Mohamad Jahubar, some sort of shop assistant at Victoria Product Centre, which sells handicrafts in addition to collectibles, said business has fallen by above 80 per cent because February.
He said that wage subsidies from your Government had helped however the shop owners have was required to dig into their savings to keep the business going.
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