Singapore colonial

Singapore was a trading place long before Raffles rocked up and made it into a hub for the British Empire. It’s hard to separate the thriving modern city from its colonial past, but it’s impossible to disentangle the place from the deeply intertwined layers of Malay, Chinese and Indian influences.

On the Helix

Today was a bit of a slow day to renew our bearings. We walked down to the Marina area with its array of high-end shops, across the Helix Bridge and round to the Museum of Asian Civilization. The Museum does a rather nice job of demonstrating what a melting pot of influences Singapore represents; and how trading brought those influences to bear not only on this place but on the the places goods came from and went to.

One of the best bits is a display of goods salvaged from a ship that went down in the year 800. The ceramics in particular could have been made yesterday. There was also a bronze mirror that was already an antique when the ship went down, having been cast some 900 years earlier.

After the museum we walked through Raffles Place, where the man himself was supposed to have landed and past a range of (symbolically?) shining white colonial buildings to an icon of the era – the Raffles hotel. There we whiled away some time under the fans in the Long Bar sipping Singapore Slings, nibbling on peanuts, and throwing peanut shells to the floor. All of which was pretty much like I imagine it would have been in the 1860s.

An afternoon by the pool back at our own hotel – where the feature is an urban garden rather than a disdain for cleanly disposing of peanut shells – was a welcome relief from the humidity.

This evening we joined a food tour. It covered Chinese, Indian and Malay food and gave us the chance to try things we’d otherwise have struggled to find. The guide was also a treasure-trove of detail about Singaporean life and history. For example we learned that Singapore has converted their entire river basin from brackish, dirty water to a clean, freshwater reservoir in order become independent of Malaysian water supplies. And it’s done it so well that the water it still gets from Malaysia it cleans and then sells back at a profit. The trading nation lives on.

Satay

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