Saturday, March 26, 2011

Falim Building Since 1906

Lahat Road is one of the busiest road in Ipoh where it links the city to its major satellite town Menglembu. Although there are more alternative routes to reach Menglembu but Lahat Road still handles heavy traffic. Falim is located between Ipoh city center & Menglembu & thousands of cars passing by here everyday. Traffic congestion always happen during rush hours, the queue would begin from the flyover in front of F&N at north of Falim to the traffic light at south of Falim that stretch almost a kilometer. The shops are locating only at one side of Lahat Road and most of them still remain at its original appearance. I am not sure how this old building at the corner has attracted people's attention when passing by Falim but it does catch my eyes, mainly by the number 1906. It seems the building has been here since 1906, more than a century ago. Anyway this shop did created curiosity in the blog of Ipoh World & there are some discussions in this link. An interesting fact is the top decoration is very similar to a shop at Hugh Low Street. However, I discover something more interesting is the Chinese words below 1906, it is written "中华民国纪元前六年" which means "Year 6 before Republic of China". As I know, Republic of China 中华民国 (current government of Taiwan) was established in 1911 and the years after that is normally recorded as Year X of Republic of China (中华民国X年). But this is the first time I see "year before". And this has created questions in my mind; if the building is completed in 1906, which mean before 1911, the way to record year should not use the name Republic of China because it was not established yet. It seems the decoration part of this shop might be added on during later years after its completion. Another question is the calculation of year; if applying the usual method in Taiwan to consider 1911 as year zero, 1906 was 5 years before 1911, but why the record on building marked it as 6 years before? Look like we have some puzzles to solve :-)

1 comment:

  1. Hi Chun Kee,

    I think you must be referring to my former home at 188 HLS. Yes, this building and my former home did shared a similar feature. I too, went to have a look at this Falim shop recently.

    ReplyDelete

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