Singapore is a relentlessly G-rated experience, micromanaged by a state
that has the look and feel of a very large corporation. If IBM had ever
bothered to actually possess a physical country, that country might have
had a lot in common with Singapore. There's a certain white-shirted
constraint, an absolute humorlessness in the way Singapore Ltd. operates;
conformity here is the prime directive, and the fuzzier brands of
creativity are in extremely short supply.
There is no slack in Singapore. Imagine an Asian version of Zurich
operating as an offshore capsule at the foot of Malaysia; an affluent
microcosm whose citizens inhabit something that feels like, well,
Disneyland. Disneyland with the death penalty.
But Disneyland wasn't built atop an equally peculiar 19th-century theme
park - something constructed to meet both the romantic longings and purely
mercantile needs of the British Empire. Modern Singapore was - bits of the
Victorian construct, dressed in spanking-fresh paint, protrude at quaint
angles from the white-flanked glitter of the neo-Gernsbackian metropolis.
These few very deliberate fragments of historical texture serve as a
reminder of just how deliciously odd an entrepot Singapore once was - a
product of Empire kinkier even than Hong Kong.
The sensation of trying to connect psychically with the old Singapore is
rather painful, as though Disneyland's New Orleans Square had been erected
on the site of the actual French Quarter, obliterating it in the process
but leaving in its place a glassy simulacrum. The facades of the remaining
Victorian shop-houses recall Covent Garden on some impossibly bright
London day. I took several solitary, jet-lagged walks at dawn, when a
city's ghosts tend to be most visible, but there was very little to be
seen of previous realities: Joss stick smouldering in an old brass holder
on the white-painted column of a shop-house; a mirror positioned above the
door of a supplier of electrical goods, set to snare and deflect the evil
that travels in a straight line; a rusty trishaw, chained to a freshly
painted iron railing. The physical past, here, has almost entirely
vanished.
In 1811, when Temenggong, a local chief, arrived to resettle Singapura,
the Lion City, with a hundred Malays, the jungle had long since reclaimed
the ruins of a 14th-century city once warred over by Java, Siam, and the
Chinese. A mere eight years later came Sir Stamford Raffles, stepping
ashore amid a squirming tangle of kraits and river pirates, to declare the
place a splendid spot on which to create, from the ground up, a British
trading base. It was Raffles's singular vision to set out the various
colonial jewels in Her Majesty's crown as distinct ethnic quarters: here
Arab Street, here Tanjong Pagar (Chinese), here Serangoon Road (Indian).
And Raffles's theme park boomed for 110 years - a free port, a Boy's Own
fantasy out of Talbot Mundy, with every human spice of Asia set out on a
neatly segmented tray of sturdy British china: "the Manchester of the
