Singapore - Diners at ex-hawker's restaurant get to feast their eyes on his treasures.

Two mammoth stone statues stand sentry outside a new Teochew restaurant along Keong Saik Road, the former Chinatown red-light district which is now home to hip eateries and boutique hotels.

They are of ancient officials, representing the Chinese ideals of wen wu (master of pen and sword).

Standing at 2.5m tall and weighing two tonnes each, they are carved out of granite, their facial features almost obliterated by time and the elements.

"They are from the Song dynasty, about 1,000 years old," says owner Alwyn Tan, 53, who paid a tidy sum for them many years ago. He is not afraid of thieves.

"I have closed-circuit TVs. Anyway, they are so heavy you will need a crane to cart them away," he says.

More treasures await in the four-storey Cheng Hoo Tian restaurant.

The four dining rooms on the second floor, for instance, are partitioned by 46 panels, fashioned from camphor wood with intricately carved scenes - rendered in gold paint - depicting Confucian values such as filial piety and benevolence.

At 3.3m tall and 40cm wide each, the 150-year-old panels came from an ancestral home in a village in Chao'an county, north of Swatow in China.

And in the private dining room on the fourth floor, Mr Tan has on display about 100 items which will draw gasps.

These include a Song dynasty bowl and an elephant statue carved from a single piece of jadeite. The statue weighs 40kg and is from the Qing dynasty.

"When I first saw it 20 years ago, my heart missed a beat," he says. "I bargained and negotiated, and finally paid $120,000 - the price of a five-room HDB flat in those days - for it."

Today, its estimated worth is a couple of million dollars.

If his collection of antiques is intriguing, Mr Tan himself is no less so.

The bachelor is not, he takes great pains to stress, to the manor born. A former hawker, he built his collection of antiques by scrimping and saving over the last three decades, during which he worked in an array of jobs - army medic, horticulturalist, landscape artist, fish breeder - and experienced many trials and tribulations.

His late paternal grandfather was a building contractor who lost his wealth overnight after a disastrous building project.

"When my mother first married into the family, she had four maids waiting on her. My father had a chauffeur. They lived in a big house on a big plot of land in Geylang," he says.

But by the time Mr Tan - the third of seven children - came along, the family fortune had been decimated. Home was a wooden house with a zinc roof in Paya Le-bar, shared with his grandparents and five uncles and aunts as well as their families.

"My grandfather became depressed and reclusive; my grandma had to start raising chickens to help make ends meet; my dad became a painting contractor and my mother sold kway chap and laksa from a pushcart," he says. Kway chap is a Teochew dish of flat rice sheets served with dishes including braised pig offal, beancurd and preserved vegetables.

By the time he was eight, he was already his mother's able little assistant, not only helping her with the shopping for ingredients but also with the washing and chopping of offal.

During his school holidays, the former student of Kwong Avenue Primary and Bartley Secondary School took up all sorts of jobs to help supplement the family income.

"I was a cargo hand at the airport, I sewed gunny sacks at a factory and I was a construction worker," he says, adding that he once nearly fell several floors from an uncompleted building while tipping over a wheelbarrow filled with construction debris to the ground floor.

Although he qualified for pre-university studies, he left after just two weeks.

"While the teachers were teaching, my mind was on the stall," says Mr Tan, whose mother was then operating a stall selling prawn noodles and fishball noodles in Sin Ming Road.

"I asked myself, what good would studying do if I couldn't help to put food on the table. I guess I had no ambition then, I just wanted to make money."

For two years, he worked at the stall until he got called up for national service, where he signed a four-year contract to be trained as a combat medic.

He was lured by the monthly pay of $460, instead of the $89 allowance regular national servicemen received.

"It seemed like a pretty good deal," he says with a laugh.

His training included a stint in forensics working under famous pathologist Chao Tzee Cheng, who died in 2000.

Professor Chao, he recalls, was quite impressed with his dexterity in dissecting and stitching up bodies during post-mortems.

"He laughed when I told him I was good at slicing and stitching because I used to sell kway chap and stitch gunny sacks in a factory," he recalls.

He did well in the army and was drawing $1,800 when his contract was up. But Mr Tan surprised both his chief medical officer and his mother when he decided to leave the army, and became an apprentice in a landscaping company for just $430 a month instead.

His interest in horticulture was sparked during a visit to Taiwan where he saw many beautiful landscaped parks and gardens.

"My mother thought I was deranged but I told her I would not be stuck at $430 for too long," says Mr Tan, who used the army gratuity he was paid to enrol in a part-time horticulture course conducted by the School of Ornamental Horticulture at the Botanic Gardens.

Barely 11/2 years into his job, he left to join another landscaping firm which offered him a salary of $1,300.

He stayed with the company for five years, during which he worked on the landscaping for condominiums such as Clementi Park.

"By the time I left, I was already drawing about $5,000 a month," he says.

He struck out on his own, investing $3,000 to rent a small yard by the sea in Punggol 17th Avenue.

He took on several projects, including one from the Shangri-La Group to manage a plot of land in Jalan Kayu.

"I literally slept in a container in the wilderness. With just two or three workers, I cleared the land, grew plants, started a nursery.

When you're young, you're just full of vigour and energy."

He did such a good job that he soon bagged contracts to landscape the grounds of several Shangri-La properties in Singapore, Sabah and Myanmar.

All went well for several years. He made enough to buy himself a terraced house in Hougang and indulge in his love for antiques.

But the 1997 Asian financial crisis took the wind out of his sails.

A business deal - which he declined to elaborate on - went terribly wrong and left him with huge debts.

He sold his house to pay off what he owed and downgraded to a four-room Housing Board flat in Hougang. His antiques, however, were untouched.

"I can eat and live simply. But I scrimped and saved to buy each piece of antique. They mean a lot to me. I've never sold any of the pieces I've bought."

To get out of the funk he had fallen into, he took on jobs abroad, including a six-month stint with the Singapore Tourism Board at the World Horticulture Expo in Kunming.

He returned to Singapore in 2000 and had planned to go into semi-retirement and "not go chasing after money".

Fate, however, nipped that plan in the bud. A fellow worshipper at the Goddess of Mercy temple he goes to in Telok Blangah sought his help to renovate a Keong Saik shophouse owned by her two adoptive mothers.

"The place had not been renovated for 75 years. The staircase was rickety and the roof - which was termite-infested - was in danger of collapsing," he says.

He undertook the project, and after it was completed, he was seized by an urge to rent the place and start a restaurant.

Grateful for his help, the owners agreed and gave him a long lease.

"I wanted a career switch, and because I love to eat and was a former hawker, I thought I would open a Teochew restaurant," he says. "I also needed a place to house all my antiques so I thought this would be killing two birds with one stone."

The hunt for a restaurant concept led him to food consultant Koh Teck Chuan, whose grandparents started Cheng Hoo Tian, a Teochew restaurant near Ellenborough Market, in 1936. The restaurant ceased operations about 30 years ago after Mr Koh's father died, and when rent and other overheads kept going up.

Mr Tan says: "I asked my mother if she had heard of Cheng Hoo Tian.

She told me that my grandfather used to eat there."

The food consultant broached the idea of reviving Cheng Hoo Tian, and hanging his father's old signboard at the new restaurant.

"As a food consultant, he also had all the recipes. I was thrilled," says Mr Tan.

The deal was struck after Mr Koh consulted his seven siblings, all of whom were happy that the Cheng Hoo Tian name was being resurrected.

Two elder brothers, Teck Guang, 79, and Teck Kwee, 62, even came on board to helm the back kitchen and run the front desk. With the concept finalised, Mr Tan spent a six-figure sum on building the kitchen and other renovations.

"Hopefully, I can recoup my investments in five years," he says.

Cheng Hoo Tian opened its doors in January this year. Mr Koh, unfortunately, died at age 72 one month before it began operations.

Business has been brisk, with the restaurant attracting foodies, professionals in the area as well as doctors from the Singapore General Hospital nearby.

The new venture has given Mr Tan a new vigour. His role model, he says, is his mother, now 79.

"She raised seven children and cared for two aged parents while working as a roadside hawker. She is a real plucky woman."

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