Singaporeans will be familiar with a road in Singapore known as Balestier Road. It’s a foodie street, with two famous chicken rice joints (Loy Kee and Boon Tong Kee), at least three old-school tau sar piah (Teochew pastry) shops, and Rochor Beancurd. Then there’s Sin Hon Loong Bakery, one of the few remaining traditional bakeries in Singapore with its pillowy soft loaves, and Lam Yeo Coffee Power Factory, which I thought was truly a relic from another age. Then there are the historic buildings too. One of them is the Sun Yat Sen Nanyang Memorial Hall, a two-storey villa where Dr Sun would stay three or four times in the early 1900s, and which at one time was Southeast Asia headquarters of anti-Qing revolutionary activities, before that base was moved to Penang. The other is the Maha Sasanaramsi Burmese Buddhist Temple which houses the largest known Buddha statue outside Myanmar. Quite some street, I would say!
But all this is just the tip of the iceberg. The huge surprise for me was finding out that Balestier Road is named after Joseph Balestier, the first consul to Singapore for the United States from 1837 to 1852. And his wife was Maria Revere Balestier, the daughter of the anti-British American patriot Paul Revere. When I first learnt about this, I was blown away. What are the odds of that!
Paul Revere is a Boston silversmith immortalised in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “Midnight Ride”. On April 16, 1775, hearing that there would be a raid on the US city of Concord in the coming days, he made plans to alert the surrounding countryside by horseback that the British were coming. There were two routes the British soldiers could take: by land through the Boston Neck or by sea across the Charles River. Paul Revere arranged to have one lantern hung from the steeple of the Old North Church in Boston if the British came by land, and two lanterns if they came by sea. (Below are snaps of the Old North Church I took as part of a tour of the Freedom Trail, a must-do for all history buffs when touring Boston. The plaque says “The signal lanterns of Paul Revere displayed in the steeple of this church April 18, 1775 warned the country of the march of the British troops to Lexington and Concord.)
Old North Church 
Paul Revere’s home in Boston
Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.
He said to his friend, “If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry-arch
Of the North-Church-tower, as a signal light, —
One if by land, and two if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country-folk to be up and to arm.”
Excerpt from LongFELLOW’s POEM “MIDNIGHT RIDE”
Halfway around the globe here in Singapore some 70 years later, his daughter Maria Revere Balestier would write to her family to ask for a bell to be sent here. She donated the bell, cast by the Revere Copper Company in Boston, and measuring 81cm in height and 89cm in diameter, to the first Church of St Andrew (today’s St Andrew’s Cathedral) in 1843 on condition that it be rung at 8pm every night to sound a curfew.
This was to warn the sailors and inhabitants of Singapore then to return to their ships or to go home, because night had fallen and it would be dangerous to roam the streets. Her father had an intelligence and warning system set up using lanterns. Maria Revere used a bell. Both played significant roles in serving the people of the land. What I find remarkable is that between 1792 and 1843, the Revere Copper Company cast over 900 bells. Only one is outside the US today, and it sits in the National Museum of Singapore’s History Gallery. More on the Balestiers and the correspondence Maria Revere Balestier had with her family can be found in a book called “The Balestiers” by Richard Hale, which can be found in Singapore public libraries or online.