The other Raffles Hotel

Posted by noelbynature under Buildings and Monuments
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If this building doesn’t look familiar to you, that’s because it’s not to be found in Singapore. This mansion, once four storeys high, was most recently used as a school, and before that as a hotel. When it was a hotel, you could say that it carried the ‘Raffles Brand’.

Jerome lets us in on the hotel’s former name, Raffles-by-the-Sea:

The mansion also played its part in the history of China, being sold to fund Dr. Sun Yat Sen’s revolutionary efforts, by Cheah Tek Soon’s daughter who inherited the building and was married to a supporter of Sun Yat Sen. With the sale of the mansion to a rich local merchant Tye Kee Yoon in the 1910s, the mansion began its life as the Bellevue Hotel, which with an intended reputation for luxury, service and comfort, could have epitomised the Romance of Travel at the turn of the century, and came to be popularly known as Raffles-by-the Sea.

Any idea where this building, a former hotel and school, stands? Hint: It’s also on an island. Find out the answer in Jerome’s Long and Winding Road.