Haw Par Villa: the park built to scare you into behaving

Singaporean parents once marched their children through hell to improve their manners, and it mostly worked.

Go for the Ten Courts of Hell, with teenagers or curious adults, and accept that the park in the photographs is partly off limits for now. The wider grounds have been partially closed for repairs since December 2025, so this is a Hell’s Museum visit with whatever garden is open thrown in, not the old free-roaming wander. Children under nine should sit it out: the museum advises against bringing them, because the Courts contain explicit scenes, and it means it. Check the closure dates before you set off for Pasir Panjang, because the museum keeps its own calendar.

Tiger Balm’s Aw Boon Haw conceived the park in 1937 as a moral picture book in painted concrete: more than 1,000 statues and around 150 dioramas drawn from Chinese folklore, history and religion, every one of them nudging you towards honesty, loyalty and calling your grandmother more often. Generations of local children were taken there to frighten them into behaving. The question isn’t how weird it looks, it’s what each scene is trying to tell you.

First, the access notice

Journeys, the heritage company that ran the park from 2015, reached the end of its contract on 7 December 2025, and the Singapore Tourism Board announced that Haw Par Villa would be partially closed from 8 December for essential maintenance and repairs, until further notice. STB says it is consulting stakeholders on the park’s future, so treat any old garden itinerary as history rather than a plan.

Hell’s Museum, including the Ten Courts, stays open. It is closed on Mondays and on a long list of dated days, ten of them in November, so check the list on the official site the day before you go.

The family behind the balm

The name is a sibling act. In Haw Par’s corporate history, Boon Haw, born 1882, was the “gentle tiger” who gave Tiger Balm its name in 1909; younger brother Boon Par, the “gentle leopard”, ran the family practice. In 1937 Boon Par was given a Pasir Panjang mansion whose gardens depicted Chinese mythology, open to the public as the Tiger Balm Gardens. The Art Deco villa itself was bombed in the war and later demolished. STB took over in 1988 and tried, with a 1980s plan dubbed an “oriental Disneyland”, to turn it into a paid theme park. It lost money for a decade, and entry went free in 1998. The moral, presumably, is somewhere in the Ten Courts.

Read the Ten Courts like a rulebook

This is where the message gets blunt. Each court tries a category of sinner, and the punishments are startlingly specific: your heart removed for disrespecting elders, sawn in half for wasting food, impaled for moneylending and cheating, with exam cheats, tax evaders and tomb raiders each given their own grim appointment. Notice the hierarchy. Ingratitude sits alongside fraud, which tells you a lot about the values the scenes were built to teach.

On your own it is easy to walk past the dioramas without reading them, which is the case for the free guided tour: it is the difference between gawping and understanding. Sessions run several times a day, registered first come, first served at the lobby, and may be suspended in bad weather; as the site cheerfully puts it, “Part of hell is open to the elements.”

Then the museum’s bigger question

Hell’s Museum opened in 2021 and bills itself as the world’s first museum of death and the afterlife. It sets the Courts beside how other religions and cultures think about dying, with replicas of a burial crypt, altars, a traditional Chinese grave and, most affecting for residents, a void deck funeral. The museum suggests allowing two to four hours; two is plenty if the Courts are your main reason for coming.

Choose your company, then somewhere green

For teenagers and curious adults, this is one of the better conversations you can have on a weekend afternoon: ask each other which court you would be heading for. Then go somewhere green to recover. HortPark’s themed gardens, from the Native Garden to a Scented Garden, make a gentle palate cleanser. Labrador Nature Reserve has wartime coastal-fort relics, but parts have been closed for slope works since 2023, the Casemate and Rocky Shore are shut for safety, and the Berlayar Creek boardwalk is closed until 31 March 2027, so check before you count on it.

Go for the morals, stay for the macabre, and leave with at least one new reason to finish your rice.

Good to know Hell’s Museum is open 10am–6pm with last entry at 5pm, but closed on Mondays and on dated days listed on hawparvilla.sg. Free guided tours run at 10.30am, 12.15pm, 1.30pm, 2.45pm and 4.15pm, weather permitting; tickets are S$22 for adults and S$12 for children, with under-sixes free. The wider park is partially closed for maintenance until further notice, so check the official site (or call 6325 1631, Mon–Fri) before you go.

More small museums with big stories…