The area around Sungei Road formerly housed affluent Europeans and Asians, and many ornately designed buildings were built there.

[2] In the 1820s, the area around Sungei Road was designated by Sir Stamford Raffles, the founder of modern Singapore, for the homes of affluent Europeans and Asians, when he divided the early settlements according to different ethnic groups.

[3] At nearby Lavender Street was the attap house of Cho Ah Chee, the carpenter of the ship S.S Indiana in which Raffles travelled to Singapore in 1819.

It is believed that Raffles gave the house to Guangdong-born Cho, in recognition of his services at the time of the founding of Singapore.

[2] The open-air market soon acquired a bad reputation as the major dissemination venue for stolen goods that would last to the present day.

If an item was "lost" recently, people can try their luck in looking for it at the Thieves' Market, and buying it back from the sellers who will always claim no knowledge of its source.

[7] In the mid-1990s, the old shop house buildings were torn down, resulting in street peddlers displaying their wares on canvas sheets along the empty roads in the area.

[10] Despite its notorious reputation, there were a few cases of honest and hardworking karung guni men who made good, and became millionaires.

One was Poon Buck Seng who started his business with only a capital of S$50 by picking up junk, or paying small amounts for things people were throwing away in the 1980s.

He made a few thousand dollars every month and five years later, Poon had saved enough money to buy a 1,636 square feet (152.0 m2) freehold property worth S$730,000 and was offered S$1.4 million for the unit in a collective sale later.

It was sold with the thick bee hoon (Chinese noodle) cut up and served only with a spoon, without chopsticks, topped with cockles, bean sprouts and home-made fried fish cakes in distinctive chicken motif bowls.

Today, the brothers have since lost contact with Ah Tong, but their children still serve the traditional recipe, using charcoal fire to keep his gravy constantly warm to maintain its distinctive flavour.

[3] Despite its long history, the flea market was permanently closed on 10 July 2017, with government authorities reclaiming the land for "future residential development".