Haw Par Villa
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Haw Par Villa (Chinese: 虎豹别墅) is a Chinese mythological theme park in Singapore, located beside Pasir Panjang Road.
The park contains over 1,000 statues and 150 giant dioramas depicting scenes from Chinese folklore, legends, history, and illustrating various aspects of Confucianism. These include The Laughing Buddha, The Goddess of Mercy, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and most famously The Ten Courts of Hell, a depiction of a gruesome underworld of tortures and torments set in the mouth of a 60 meter long dragon.
[edit] History
The park, originally called “Tiger Balm Gardens”, was constructed in 1937 by the brothers Aw Boon Haw and Aw Boon Par, the developers of Tiger Balm, as a venue for teaching traditional Chinese values.
The park was renamed Haw Par Villa in 1985, when it was converted into an amusement park, with many of the statues and scenes replaced with fairground rides. However this new incarnation proved unpopular, and more recently many of the old features have been replaced, such as the dragon ride.
