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Panorama Showing The Yau Tet Shin Circular Market (Bazaar)
This is a photograph of Ipoh's new $500,000 Yau Tet Shin bazaar. This was the last market in Ipoh (now demolished) to bear the name of this famous miner and entrepreneur who developed Ipoh New Town.
Yau Tet Shin Bazaar was built to replace a sprawling and dilapidated Bazaar that was never very successful. In 1960, the Ipoh Town Council invited architects throughout Malaya and Singapore to submit designs for a proposed Yau Tet Shin comples including a Market and Shopping Centre.
The winning design, based on the requirement that "each shoplot trader should have equal opportunity" and submitted by Architect Booty Edwards & Partners, was constructed at a cost of $500,000 and opened in 1962. It was a circular block described as having a projecting shell roof and balcony terminating in two gradual ramps. Located on Cowan Street it soon became a landmark known to the locals as Pasar Bulat (the circular market) or pat-kok lau (octagonal villa).
The above is adapted from the book 'Ipoh: the Town That Tin Built' published for the Municipal Council in 1962.
Although famous throughout Perak for its range of suitcases and travelling bags, it also had three chinese restaurants (The most famous named Chow Kee), record shops, an ice cream parlour and stalls selling Perak's famous Pomeloes and Groundnuts.
Said to be dilapidated, poorly maintained and a danger to the shoppers and shopkeepers alike, the market was demolished in 2002, barely 40 years after it was constructed.
Ipoh Remembered recalls:
"The original market was not particularly "sprawling" and it was fairly successful in the early days — 1908-1933, say — but by the 1950s it certainly was dilapidated.
To the best of my recollection, there was no "wet market" in the replacement that was built in the early 1960s. It was a shopping centre with some restaurants."