Travel with Angela Lansbury: Mural of people and places at Bishan MRT station in Singapore

I thought I saw two version of this mural at two levels of the station. I passing forwards, left to right, in one direction earlier in the day and in another direction, right to left, later in the day. You can see from the fire extinguisher on the left that the mural is quite large, at least six foot tall and at least eighteen foot long.

It is hard to take a picture without people walking in front of it because it is in a busy corridor.

The circular plaque above the fire extinguisher tells you about the artist, the mural, and which company has commissioned the artwork.

The Name Bishan

Bishan
碧山

The sign on the right is shan, meaning mountain. You have to imagine the line connecting the three points of the top of the three upright lines. The central upright represents the top of the peak.

The name Bishan incorporated the word shan which is Chinese (Mandarin - as spoken in the modern capital of China, Beijing). Shan means mountain. The wikipedia website gives a Cantonese origin of the name.

Shan becomes San in Cantonese. However, Chinese writing is usually the same (except in rarer cases of copying phonestics) in all the dialects and Japanese. Rather like the no smoking sign being a cigarette with a line through it, although the words you say are different in european countries.

If you look at the Chinese writing you can immediately spot the sign for mountain or hill which is three verticals, the middle one highest, on a base line or solid ground. (The same sign is in the Chinese for the station with the English name, Hillview.)

I have two friends called Shan, short for Shan Shan. In Chinese and in Malay and probably some other languages you create a plural by saying a word twice. So hill or mountain is shan. Shan shan means mountains or hills.

Hillview

山景
The sign on the left is the sign for hill or mountain.