a penny for this?

A narrow 5-storey shophouse designed by Chan Soo Khian from the award-winning SCDA Architects, the private MINT museum of toys is located at Seah Street, right beside the Raffles Hotel. At the basement is a cafe with seats upholstered in a specially-made robot pattern brocade!

There was an article in the papers about the the museum recently, so I shan't describe the museum in any detail - except to say it's a great place to spend a slow lazy weekend afternoon.


I want a name card like this...

I guess one of the perks of my job is that I get to go to a museum on a weekday afternoon and call it work!

But what's better is being brought round the museum by its owner, Mr Chang. An engineer in his 50s who started collecting toys since he was a kid, Mr Chang now has a 3000 sq ft warehouse full of toys. On display at the museum are just 5% of his collection of pre-80s toys of every genre imaginable. But how did an engineer get to start and own his own museum?!? By living modestly otherwise. His wife revealed that their 3 children share 1 bedroom. They don't own a garage full of fancy cars.

It's all about choice. That's what Mr Chang taught me that day. And passion - sustained and pursued without compromise.

Once, when asked to choose 1 toy to speak to a group of schoolkids about, Mr Chang chose a penny toy made in Germany in the 30s. A simple tin toy of a woman pushing a cart, but beautifully and carefully made. He wanted to use the toy to illustrate the lesson that no matter how menial or unimportant your job may seem, do it to the utmost and do it with pride. Though it cost only a penny, whoever designed and made the tin toy did so carefully and with obvious attention to detail. Now that's a trait many of us Singaporeans are not brought up to value. Instead, we are taught to judge everything and weigh our effort pragmatically against the financial return or reward received.

Mr Chang also showed us his special collection of Micale Dolls, each handmade by the late Michael Lee - a 4 feet tall man with a big heart, giving all the money he made to refugees in Hong Kong.

The only disappointment was the cliche blown up in the museum's elevator, "He with the most toys, when he dies, wins." Surely someone who professes to admire Michael Lee and espouses the virtues of the penny toy cannot believe this ridiculous cliche. I comfort myself that his branding consultant must have insisted on this.

J and I don't have a museum. But for nothing, not even a penny, ampulets share with you some of our favourite stuffed toys here.