Giveaways
FROM Melaka, I caught another coach southward to the independent city-state of Singapore. The inter-city coaches, or buses, are very brightly coloured in this part of the world, and I thought I would get a picture of a couple of them.
The name Singapore sounds like the Sanskrit for ‘Lion City’, and that is probably its origin. Even though Asia east of Iran is prowled by tigers and not lions, which even in ancient historical times never ranged east of today’s Bangladesh, many towns and landmarks in East Asia are named after lions all the same.
Singapore became independent from Malaysia in 1965. From 1966 onward, Singapore has been symbolised, officially, by a creature that is half-lion and half-fish, called a merlion (like a mermaid, only with a lion on top).
(Having said that, no one knows the true origin of the name Singapore for a fact. It could just as easily be a corruption of a phrase that means ‘gateway to China’; though most prefer to stick with the ‘lion city’ explanation.)
As luck would have it, I arrived during Diwali, or Deepavali: the Indian festival of lights.
Singapore by night is just amazing in any case. Check out the following video of Marina Bay by night. Its thumbnail features the Marina Bay Sands resort and casino.
The Marina Bay Sands includes three buildings that are each split at the bottom and joined together at the top like two cards propped up against each other, with all three joined at the very top by the boat-shaped SkyPark Observation Deck.
The SkyPark Observation Deck on top of the Marina Bay Sands Resort is open to the general public as well as guests; it currently costs S$32 for casual admission for one via the resort’s booking site.
Along with the huge skyscrapers there is also an abundance of stately buildings left over from earlier times.
The current Singapore Parliament buildings are only a generation old, but were done in an old-fashioned style to fit in with the surrounding heritage precinct as well as an 1860s colonial building that was incorporated into the complex.
I checked into the 7 Wonders Hostel at Boat Quay and went out exploring. It wasn’t long before I came across the ‘squatters and squalor’ statues in Nankin Street, depicting labourers of the past.
Here is a video of the statues:
Although Singapore Island has been settled for a long time, with one of the oldest overseas Chinese communities in the world, the Peranakans (just like Melaka), the whole of Singapore Island still only had a population of about a thousand when the British East India Company acquired it from the Sultan of the neighbouring Malay state of Johor in 1819.
(Singapore would later become a directly ruled British colony, before achieving self-government in 1959 and independence as part of Malaysia in 1963, before becoming an independent country in 1965.)
The person who organised the 1819 transfer from Johor was Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, who is generally accounted as the founder of modern Singapore.
For, the British had great plans for Singapore, intending it to be a key port of their trading empire, and its population soon exploded.
But as I say, there had long been people there already. Indeed, while clearing the mouth of the Singapore River for their intended port in 1819, the British found a large slab of rock that was covered in inscriptions thought to be about a thousand years old. Although their script resembles alphabets used in India, Sri Lanka, and Sumatra, the writings on the slab have still not yet been deciphered.
The slab was already known to the locals and was even the subject of a legend whereby it had been hurled to the mouth of the river by a mighty strongman of the past, Badang. But by 1819 it was mostly buried under dirt and vegetation.
Under the scientifically minded Raffles, the British decided to expose the slab further to study its mysterious inscriptions.
Perhaps because its inscriptions resembled an Indian language, Bengali labourers refused to work on the slab, fearing they might fall under a curse for disturbing its slumber. Chinese toilers were therefore employed instead.
In 1843, under a less enlightened leadership, the British had the slab blown up to clear the way into their new port, an action that even at the time was regarded by many as a stunning act of historical vandalism. Recalling the strike of the Bengalis, one observer wrote, that, “What a pity it is that those who authorized the destruction of the ancient relic were not prevented by some such wholesome superstition!”
Bits and pieces of the slab remain in various museums, including one that is in Singapore’s National Museum and which is called the Singapore Stone, one of Singapore’s national treasures.
The British then built a fort on the site of the slab called Fort Fullerton, where Fullerton Square and today’s Fullerton Hotel now stand, and another fort inland from the port called Fort Canning, which is now open to the public as a museum.
Fort Canning sits atop a hill called Government Hill, which at one time had a commanding view (before modern skyscrapers arose) and indeed still has a Victorian lighthouse at its highest point.
Here is the ground-plan of the fort.
The fort includes the Raffles Garden, named after the aforementioned founder of British Singapore, who among his other talents and scientific interests was also a keen botanist.
The Raffles Garden includes the Fort Canning Lighthouse, which was completed, I believe, in 1855.
The following building, behind some trees and a pole, was the headquarters of the British Far East Command during the first years of World War II, which is to say, until the arrival of General Yamashita.
Ah yes, that business.
On the left, you can see today’s Fullerton Hotel, which was, I think, the Singapore General Post Office in 1942. I would have taken a better photo if I had realised its historical significance.
The fall of Singapore to a Japanese force considerably smaller than the numbers of British, Australian, and Indian troops defending the island remains one of the most unexpected military reversals in history, partly explainable by the fact that Singapore’s water supplies mostly came from the mainland (oops).
The fall of Singapore shattered the mystique of the British Empire and ensured that nearly all of the British, Dutch, and French possessions in Asia would become independent by 1963, if not before.
Singapore has been massively built up since those days, and only really got going in the 1800s, only to see much of what was built then lost to skyscrapers, with the result that it has less of an old city vibe than Phuket, Penang, or Melaka. But it still has quite a few old buildings that would have seen the invasion of the Japanese, quite apart from the big and imposing official ones.
And, of course, the famous Raffles Hotel: the haunt in its day of people like the writer W. Somerset Maugham, whose line, “Raffles Hotel stands for all the fables of the Exotic East,” came to be used in the hotel’s advertising.
The older buildings also include those of a Chinatown; though in truth, most of the people in Singapore are descended from Chinese migrants who moved to Singapore in its boom years after 1824. That demographic difference is one of the reasons Singapore split from Malaysia in 1965.
I also went inside an Indian temple.
As I noted above, Singapore became a self-governing British colony in 1959, a state of independent Malaysia in 1963, and then split from Malaysia to become an independent republic in 1965. Lee was its Prime Minister through all these events.
Singapore seems to have often enjoyed the benefit of competent leaders, from Raffles at the time of the founding of modern Singapore through to Lee Kuan Yew, who guided Singapore to independence as the first Prime Minister of Singapore, from 1959 until 1990.
A major criticism of Lee’s style of government, and of the government of Singapore since Lee, is that, while competent, it has been authoritarian and not particularly democratic. Singapore seems to be rather like China in that respect, although Singapore has elections and more than one political party. And from 1819 to 1959, of course, Singapore was a colony that wasn’t even of the self-governing type.
A 2023 article called ‘Housing Lessons from Singapore’ describes Singapore’s focus, since 1960, on building affordable but mostly high-rise housing on land owned by the government and closely integrated with the island’s excellent Mass Rapid Transit System.
As the article also explains, 27% of Singapore’s population of nearly six million consists of foreigners without access to the housing benefits enjoyed by local citizens. About 4% of the population including foreign construction workers on contracts lasting two to three years, who mostly live in dormitories. These construction workers were hit hard by Covid, I recall.
As in other places I visited in Asia on this trip, the food was amazing!
As I first noticed in Kuala Lumpur, they also seem to be really into green buildings, in the sense of buildings covered in tropical greenery, in Singapore.
Singapore’s Oasia Hotel Downtown looks as though it is covered in ivy (hardly a new idea, of course), but what makes it especially distinctive are the 30-metre-high cutouts that contain shaded ‘sky gardens’.
Even more greenery festoons the roofs and balconies of the Parkroyal Collection Pickering, another upmarket hotel.
I headed to Singapore’s Changi Airport to fly out to Melbourne. I was just blown away by Rain Vortex, the world’s largest indoor waterfall, at Jewel Changi Airport, an entertainment and shopping complex next to one of the terminals at Singapore’s Changi Airport. Jewel Changi Airport was like a giant tropical greenhouse!
There are a great many other things to see and do in Singapore that I never got to on this short stay. They include, but are not limited to,
After Singapore, I flew to Melbourne, the subject of my next post!
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