At the end of a quiet road off Tanglin Road, behind a gate most people walked past without a second look, stood a small piece of Brunei. For a quarter of a century, the Brunei Hostel at 7A Tanglin Hill was home to generations of Bruneian students, some of them just twelve years old, sent to Singapore for an education their country could not yet give them at home.
The hostel closed in 1983 and stood empty for almost forty years. This is its story.
Why Brunei sent its children to Singapore
In the 1950s, Brunei did not yet have a recognised secondary education system, largely because it had too few trained local teachers. Its answer was to send its most promising pupils abroad. By one count, 434 Bruneians studied at schools and institutions in Singapore between 1950 and 1982.
Selection was competitive. Each year, a small group of the best performers in the Primary School Examination was chosen to go. Before the hostel on Tanglin Hill existed, many of these students lived in the Jalan Haji Salam and Geylang areas.
A hostel on Tanglin Hill
As numbers grew, the Brunei government bought land on Tanglin Hill and built a hostel of its own, completed in 1958. Curiously, it had no formal name at first. Over time it came to be known as Asrama Kerajaan Brunei di Singapura, the Brunei Government Hostel in Singapore, or AKBS for short. To Singaporeans, it was simply the Tanglin Hill Brunei Hostel.
The first buildings were low-rise blocks with pitched, tiled roofs, in a style that appears to borrow from British colonial architecture. A multi-storey dormitory block was added later, to house more students as well as Bruneian government officers on training courses. Students from Malaya lived here too, sharing rooms with the Bruneians.
Life at Asrama Kerajaan Brunei di Singapura (AKBS)
The Brunei government looked after its students well. Meals, laundry, textbooks and an allowance were all provided. One former resident who arrived in the 1970s remembered receiving $30 a month.
He was one of ten twelve-year-old boys who left Brunei on 30 March 1976 aboard a brand-new Royal Brunei Airlines Boeing 737. The plane was almost empty: thirteen passengers in all, the ten boys and three fire services officers. On arrival, they were taken straight to Tanglin Hill. There were no mobile phones, and long-distance calls were expensive, so news from home came by letter.
Life outside the classroom revolved around sport. Football was the favourite, and by the 1970s the hostel had its own team. Badminton, hockey, sepak takraw and table tennis had their followers too, and residents were later divided into houses for inter-house competitions. The hostel also marked the big occasions of home: Hari Raya, Maulidul Rasul, Israk Mikraj and the Sultan’s Birthday.
The students attended local schools around Singapore. At Telok Kurau Secondary School, the same former resident recalled, one school team was made up mostly of Bruneians.
Where they went next
Many of those who passed through the scheme went on to senior posts in Brunei. Writing in 2008, the same former resident counted fellow alumni in the Prime Minister’s Office and in the ministries of finance, foreign affairs, religious affairs, industry and primary resources, and defence.
Their memories have since been gathered into two books, Junjung Kasih (2019) and Junjung Kasih II: Legasi Bersemi Di Bumi Temasek, launched at an event organised by the Brunei History Centre. Contributors to the second volume include Brunei’s Minister of Religious Affairs, the State Mufti, a former minister and a former chief justice.
As of today, the former residents of the Tanglin Hill Brunei Hostel can be found via a Facebook group titled “AKBS Asrama Kerajaan Brunei di Singapura“, where they still regularly post photographs of their gatherings. Just like how it was back in the day.
On the interior prior to the demolition of the structure, a name “Sairul Rhymin Mohamed” was written on the walls of one of the dormitory rooms. Another tell tale sign that he studied in Singapore, was him attending Victoria School. When we reached out to him via LinkedIn, he did in fact confirm that he likely wrote it as a form of remembrance, being the last batch of students before the dormitory’s closure.
Closed in 1983
By the early 1980s, Brunei had built up secondary schools of its own, and there was no longer any need to send its children overseas. The government closed the hostel in 1983, the year before Brunei became fully independent on 1 January 1984. For decades afterwards the property stayed with the Brunei government, and the buildings were left as they were.
Forty years of silence
Nature did the rest. When we photographed the compound in 2016, trees had crashed through roofs and creepers had climbed the dormitory walls. By 2021, graffiti covered almost every surface, and the hostel had a reputation among ghost hunters and urban explorers. Nothing in its history explains the stories. It was a school hostel, full of football matches and letters home.
The compound was private property, fenced and signposted, and was never open to the public.
Look past the spray paint, though, and traces of ordinary life remained: tiled counters in a communal room, a hand-painted bunch of flowers beside a light switch, a yellowed comic page among the debris. Someone had even worked through a set of physics equations on a tiled wall.
The revival of Tanglin Brunei Hostel?
During a period some time between 2020-2021, the main admin building facing the main road was mysteriously repainted. Some speculated that it would be turned into an art gallery or a creative space. However, it could also be due to certain rules where buildings are required to be maintained and upkept, and that this was possibly done to please the authorities while figuring out what to do with the dilapidated building next.
One thing that did look suspicious, was that the windows seemed to almost look like they were drawn on like a cartoon. Definitely not functional in any way, but probably a cheaper option than to legitimately replace them.
The end of the Brunei Hostel
By early November 2022, hoarding surrounded the site and an excavator was at work in the grounds. A notice on the fence announced the “proposed demolition of existing buildings” at 7A Tanglin Hill, with a permit issued on 12 August 2022 and completion expected in the second quarter of 2023.
Many websites still describe the Tanglin Brunei Hostel as an abandoned ruin on its hill, however the entire structure has since already been completely flattened to the ground. The land still belongs to the state of Brunei, and only time can tell what this plot of land will be in the future.
For the Bruneians who grew up here, though, Tanglin Hill was where they first learnt to live away from home, and where many careers in their country’s service began.
Additional photographs
Sources
- Former Brunei Hostel, Roots.sg, National Heritage Board
- Tanglin Hill Brunei Hostel, Remember Singapore
- History of the Brunei Hostel, The Old Brunei Hostel
- Memories of Brunei Hostel in Singapore, Brunei Resources, 2008
- Chronicles of yesteryear launched, Borneo Bulletin
- Demolition notice at 7A Tanglin Hill, photographed November 2022
Credits and corrections
We do our best to credit every photograph and source on this page. If a photo here is yours and you would like it credited, if you spot an error, or if you have memories of this place you would like to share, please get in touch. We will gladly update the story.
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