High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Smith Street is a small street running through the heart of the Chinatown district in Singapore. The only road in the area to be named after an European, it commemorates the hugely popular Sir Cecil Clementi Smith, then Governor of the Straits Settlements and High Commissioner in 1887 to 1893, who was a Chinese scholar and responsible for most of the work to combat the problems of secret societies. As is common for roads with English names, it has an informal Chinese name, hei yuen kai, meaning Theatre Street in reference to the Lai Chun Yuen Theatre then located at unit 36 and the centre of entertainment in the Kreta Ayer area. The theatre existed sometime in the 1880s and staged Cantonese operas until 1927. With the advent of cinemas, the theatre was converted into a cinema theatre, Sun Seng Cinema, just before World War II, when it was damaged in a bomb attack in 1942.