Biography | Tan Su Shan — The Victoria Street Convent Where St Nicholas Girls Were Schooled

People treat a Singapore bank chief executive as someone who arrived fully formed from Marina Boulevard.

The first public campus that belongs in Tan Su Shan’s file is older than that skyline.

She is an alumna of CHIJ St Nicholas Girls’ School, the Chinese-medium convent school that the Infant Jesus Sisters opened in 1933.

From 1949 the school sat inside the Town Convent compound on Victoria Street, the same walled site that is now CHIJMES.

That is the plot a visitor can still walk: chapel, courtyards, and the brick ranges that once held classrooms.

Tan was born in 1968.

Her school years therefore ran through the last stretch of the Victoria Street campus and the scramble that followed.

By 1980 the convent buildings could no longer hold the whole school.

Classes borrowed rooms on Armenian Street and Queen Street, then temporary sites in Toa Payoh and Ang Mo Kio, while the Mass Rapid Transit tunnels cut under the old town plot.

The convent left Victoria Street in the early 1980s.

St Nicholas Girls’ School moved into its permanent Ang Mo Kio Street 13 campus on 2 January 1985.

Education Minister Tony Tan declared that new campus open on 23 August 1986.

The school took the CHIJ prefix in 1992.

What stands at 30 Victoria Street now is a gazetted historic complex of restaurants and event halls, not a working school.

The chapel and Caldwell House remain.

The girls in white and blue are gone.

That is the honest pin: the convent ground where St Nicholas was housed while she was growing up, not the later Ang Mo Kio gates and not a claim that the diploma was signed in this courtyard.

Catholic News named her among CHIJ alumnae in 2012, the same year she entered Parliament as a Nominated Member.

From here the next public campus is Lincoln College on Turl Street, where later bank filings list a Master of Arts in politics, philosophy and economics in 1989.

Photo: Bjoertvedt, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons