Discover Singapore

Singapore is a city, an island and a sovereign country of about six million people, sitting one degree north of the equator at the tip of the Malay Peninsula. It began as a Malay port known as Temasek and later Singapura, and was already a settled trading place when Sir Stamford Raffles negotiated a British post there in 1819 — a founding the country marks, though the island was neither empty nor unknown before it.

From that port grew one of the busiest harbours on earth. Singapore was taken by Japan in 1942, returned to British rule, joined Malaysia in 1963 and was expelled from it two years later, becoming independent in 1965 with no natural resources and no hinterland. What followed is the reason the country is studied elsewhere: within a single generation it went from a developing port to one of the wealthiest states in Asia.

The population is Chinese, Malay, Indian and a great many others, and the mixture is official policy rather than accident — four official languages, and public housing estates with ethnic quotas designed to stop enclaves forming. The result is a country where a Taoist temple, a mosque and a Hindu temple can stand within a few streets, and where the food is the most immediate expression of all of it.

That food is the thing most visitors remember. Hawker centres — open-air halls of specialist stalls, a culture UNESCO-listed in 2020 — serve chicken rice, laksa, chilli crab and char kway teow for a few dollars a plate, and a stall can hold a Michelin star. Alongside it sits an unusual commitment to greenery: the UNESCO-listed Botanic Gardens, the supertrees of Gardens by the Bay, and a street canopy planted deliberately since the 1960s.

The old quarters have been kept rather than cleared. The shophouses around Pagoda Street, the Chinatown Heritage Centre, Little India, Kampong Glam around the Sultan Mosque and the Peranakan terraces of Katong are all walkable, and the contrast with the towers of Marina Bay is the point.

Singapore is also famously ordered. Crime is very low, the transport works, and the laws are strict and enforced on visitors exactly as on residents — fines for littering and for eating on the train, a ban on vaping, and drug offences that carry the death penalty. Read that last one before you pack.