Time Travel

For decades, Singapore and Malaysia were known for their love of the newest, shiniest things. Now, heritage is the hot design trend in town.

- Kevin West

LITTLE OVER TWO centuries ago, British capitalist Stamford Raffles planted a trading post at Malaysia's dangling tip and named it after Singapura, ancient Sanskrit for "lion city." Labourers from China, India, and greater Malaysia heaved mountains of earth into the muddy estuary of the Singapore River to create new land for developers to lay the city-state's foundations. The investment paid off, at least for the capitalists. Singapore, today about the size of New York City, is a global commercial centre-a safe, efficient, Englishspeaking, litter-free outpost for Western companies in search of Asian markets, and vice versa.

Sure, jaded leisure travellers might find it a tad dull compared with regal Bangkok or clamorous Hong Kong, but the business of Singapore is business, and always has been. The national mindset is pragmatic, unsentimental, and profit-oriented.

In a place where space is forever at a premium, the churn of property development-build, tear down, rebuild higher, repeat-is what ploughing the land is to a great agricultural nation: a cyclical harvest, even a patriotic destiny. Real estate speculation and its twin, banking, have offered the generations the surest way to sow ambition and reap prosperity, making faith in future growth almost a geographic feature. From the top of One Raffles Place, once the tallest skyscraper in all of Asia, the economic outlook is almost invariably sunny.

"Singapore is future-positive," is how the Australian architect Richard Hassell put it to me when we met at 21 Carpenter, a hotel designed by his firm, WOHA Architects. Our conversation came midway through my stay in the city, which was to be the point of departure for a train journey through Malaysia on Belmond's Eastern & Oriental Express.