INTRODUCTION

Hundreds of kopitiam (coffee shop in Chinese dialects) are found throughout Singapore, with the majority located in the HDB (Housing and Development Board) public housing estates in which 83 per cent of Singapore's population live. Often viewed as a quintessential feature of Singapore public culture and everyday life, the kopitiam is one among several institutions and spaces within which are embedded dynamic aspects and processes of migration and social-cultural diversity, set within the larger contexts of change and globalization throughout Singapore's history.

In origin a small-scale enterprise serving drinks and foods during the colonial period of mass immigration, the kopitiam has since evolved and experienced much change over several distinct broad periods: pre-World War II until the early 1970s, massive resettlement of local communities into HDB public housing estates in the 1970s and 1980s, and rapid urbanization and globalization since the early 1990s. I examine the kopitiam's evolution of its social-cultural distinctiveness and diversity through its foods, peoples, community and heritage. I show how the kopitiam evolved from a monocultural into the multicultural community site as part of a migrationdiversity story which continues to dynamically unfold, and examine some interconnected dimensions of its history, heritage and multiculturalism.

Migration and Globalization, Local-Global Nexus

This paper is mainly empirical in substance, with several thematic foci broadly framing its discussion and its anthropological focus: a historical perspective on migration, local-global nexus, the significance of migration to the cultural and social life of local community, and the social and cultural dimensions of multiculturalism constructed historically through migration, settlement and adaptation.

In the Singapore context, a longue durée historical perspective on migration necessarily looks at mobility and settlement over the last 700 years in different eras of globalization (Tan, Heng and Kwa 2009). This paper however focuses on the two periods of mass migration throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of British imperialism and since the 1980s. British colonialism brought diverse peoples, mainly from China, India and the Malay Archipelago, to Singapore and Malaya to work and live in the ports, mines, plantations and emergent villages and towns. As Singapore received massive waves of immigrants, it grew rapidly from an entrepot trading port to a settlement with rich hinterlands in Malaya and Southeast Asia. These immigration flows stopped only just before the Second World War.