No Chinatown should be this clean.

Singapore’s Chinatown doesn’t even look like a Chinatown. It’s a trendy neighbourhood in the North American West Coast with some noodle joints sprinkled in. Instead of noisy fruit markets, chaotic grocery stores and a glut of no-frills restaurants, you see lines of 19th century houses with matching bright colours.

It’s what you assume would happen if everyone in China developed OCD. Or if they made the collective decision to became gay.

Take Tajong Pagar Rd. An old neighbourhood once deemed fit for demolition was preserved and made into shophouses. They were all painted differently in harmonious colours and populated by cafés, spas, and boutiques selling trendy fashions and quirky home décor. The kind of shops you’re glad exist but would never really buy from.

The kind of shops you find in Montreal’s Gay Village of Toronto’s Queen St., parts of which are fabulously gay.

It’s a Chinatown of cognitive dissonances. You’re in a city dominated by the Chinese in the epicentre of Indochina and you get a Barbie shopping village.

Not to say that it’s bad. Strolling around its little coloured streets is a perfect activity in the city. You see where Singapore is trying to nurture an artistic side to its buttoned-down prudence. It knows that creative economies will lead the world this century. Fostering a cultural side that lures imaginative types is a strategic move, no different from shifting their economy from manufacturing to financial services in the 90s.

Walking around you reach the neighbourhood’s centrepiece, the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple, a four-story complex that results when Buddhists have heaps of money. I’ve never seen Buddha statues so expertly lit and ceilings so delicately patterned.

The entire complex is open to visitors, including the Buddhist Culture Museum on the third floor (very nicely curated), the rooftop garden, and the namesake display, a hermetically sealed room with an ornate gold shrine holding a tooth of the Buddha.

The shrine is off limits, but a camera offers a continuous video feed of the tooth on a large flat screen. Not a close-up photo of the tooth. A live camera feed.

As it is, Singapore’s Chinatown is great if you love food, shopping, and tourist refrigerator magnets. Just outside the temple is a strip of souvenir stalls selling T-shirts, postcards, and miniature cheongsams for babies.

It’s all very adorable in a planned-out, harmonious way. Not at all what you’d expect a Chinatown to be.