Singapore Swing (7 page)

Raffles's only surviving daughter, Emma, lived until the age of 19. His widow, Sophia, settled with the company on a much reduced amount within seven months of Raffles's death and wrote a memoir of his life which she published in 1830. She died in their Edgware estate in 1858 at the age of 72; hardly an age reached by a syphilitic.

Today, London Zoo survives, bigger and grander, at the same site in Regent's Park. Nineteen species of Rafflesia have been identified, and there is a specimen at Kew Gardens that attracts scores of nose-pinching visitors every time it deigns to bloom. The temple of Borobudur is a Unesco World Heritage site, Indonesia's most popular tourist attraction.

And Singapore is a thriving metropolis of four million people.

T
he Innkeeper was watching Master Sushan intently. He had invited the Master and his retinue to dine in his establishment. He had provided him with his best rice wine, served him on his best porcelain and offered him a set of golden chopsticks. This was no ordinary inn: it was well known among people living up to ten thousand
li
away and all government messengers carrying imperial documents had commended its luxurious ambience. Old terracotta statues adorned every corner; calligraphy masterpieces hung from the walls; and the tablecloths were made of the best quality silk.

The Innkeeper craved a morsel of the philosophical insight Master Sushan possessed; the only thing he longed for in return for his hospitality was an enlightened
koan
from the lips of the Master. In vain did he hover around the sage and his two closest disciples; they were eating and drinking slowly and quietly, as if meditating before, during and after every mouthful. He tried to draw the Master into conversation by asking him if everything was alright, or whether he was happy with the food? the wine? the service? – yet Sushan would only smile and nod imperceptibly with his head.

The Innkeeper's frustration grew and grew so that eventually he dared sit down at the table with them and ask them the question that had been lingering in his mind.

‘Forgive my impertinence, Oh, Master,' he said, ‘please enlighten your poor servant whose belief in your wisdom is beyond compare. I have surrounded myself with beautiful objects but I still don't know: what is the most valuable thing in the world?'

As if on cue, a disciple spoke.

‘The most valuable thing in the world is the throne of the Emperor, for he who possesses it controls the known world,' he said.

The other disciple took up the thread.

‘The most valuable thing in the world is the teaching of the Buddha, for he who possesses it controls the known and unknown world,' he said.

At last, Master Sushan opened his mouth.

‘The most valuable thing in the world is the head of a dead cat,' he declared.

The Innkeeper and the two disciples looked at each other in bafflement.

‘Why is this, Oh Master?' they asked.

‘Because,' Master Sushan replied, ‘no one can name its price.'

- 7 -

It's hard to get away from that man Raffles. Like his cat burglar namesake, he is invisible but ubiquitous: that skyscraper is Raffles Tower extending skywards from Raffles City shopping centre; this is Raffles Avenue leading into Stamford Road; the first parallel up is Raffles Boulevard. My sling and I are getting used to walking around being stared at. Today's venture is one notch up from yesterday's colonial stroll: I still feel uncomfortable going to any nightspot, but I'm hoping that a late afternoon visit to an upmarket bar will help. I need to get over my people fright, because I'll end up agoraphobic.

I have reached the Marina Mandarin Hotel, although in Singapore it is sometimes difficult to tell where a mall starts and where a hotel begins. I've always wondered how Oxford and Cambridge undergraduates react to having tourists wander about outside their residences, looking in while the students are burning their toast. The experience must be similar to that in some of the five-star hotels in Singapore where you have casual shoppers pushing buttons in the lift just as you are trying to get to your room for a shower. The Marina Mandarin at least can claim a world first: it is the only hotel after which a flower has been named. It is an orchid, called
Dendrobium Marina Mandarin
and its appearance is as complicated to describe as the hotel's floor plan.

Although naming an orchid after a hotel is a first, the ease with which these flowers breed and mutate has led to an explosion of silly names. If you don't believe me, go to the National Orchid Garden in Singapore and look around by the crane fountain: you will be dazzled by a sprinkling of Golden Showers, small yellow orchids named in a long-disappeared, innocent past. These very gardens only recently bred an orchid called
Dendrobium Jackie Chan
and, lest we forget our sporting heroes, a local supporter created the
Holttumara Singapore Netball Team
.

I was over at the National Orchid Garden earlier because I love their glamour. I am not alone: they have been admired by Ancient Greek philosophers and Chinese emperors, and similarly Singapore's fondness for flamboyant flora goes back a long way. Its national flower is, itself, a purple orchid: the all year bloomer
Vanda Miss Joaquim
, chosen in a 1981 competition by Singapore's Ministry of Culture as part of an overall strategy to foster and bolster national pride and identity. It is sort of ‘native' to Singapore, having been cultivated in the garden of an Armenian lady, Miss Agnes Joaquim, back in 1893. Pleased immensely by her hybrid she duly registered it in Sander's List, the
Who's Who
of orchids, and entered it in several competitions, winning in the Rarest Flower category at the 1899 Singapore Flower Show. That was the peak of her success with the
Vanda,
since she died, unmarried, a few months later. One century on, like so many low-rise dwellings, her garden and her house on Narcis Street have been demolished to provide space for a shopping mall.

I don't know who first thought about it, but give the guy some kudos: orchid breeding is now used for political flattery. My jaw dropped when I walked into the VIP Orchid Garden and came across the lavender-like
Dendrobium Margaret Thatcher
(withered), named during the British prime minister's visit to the gardens in April 1985. At least she saw her orchid bloom; this is more than can be said for Princess Diana: her sparkling white jasmine-like hybrid with a pink centre was named in her memory a month after she died. There is the orchid de rigueur for Nelson Mandela (golden brown) but there is also an orange/mocha
Dendrobium
for Prince Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia and a white, pink and yellow
Mokara
for Bertie Ahern. Still, it is the
Vanda Tsolmon
, dedicated to the wife of the Mongolian prime minister, that delivers the ultimate political snub: its shrubs are refusing to flower.

Ah, orchids are great fun. Now, where am I?

Let's see. There is the old imperial NAAFI, the Britannia Club, built in the Spanish style. Like many older buildings in Singapore it is closed and under scaffolding; is it being demolished or renovated? A sign proudly shows the Health and Safety statistics: so many accident-free hours achieved in many more total man-hours toiled. The total number of fatal accidents is zero, although, confusingly, the fatalities seem to have a positive annual rate: an alarming 1.95, no units given. I consign the inexplicable to oriental mystique.

There it is – I've reached my destination, the most famous watering hole in South East Asia.

It is through grand establishments like the Savoy in London, the Ritz in Paris or the Copacabana Palace in Rio de Janeiro that a bourgeois narrative and perspective can be reconstituted; their mere presence helps define a city in the same way the city provides them with uniqueness in return. They are the catwalk on which celebrities sashay; their rooms and bars are the canvas for the creation of legends; and their past, peppered with showbiz anecdotes, provides the glamour. They may be the
Hello!
magazine alternatives to academic historical discourse, but it is there that the spirit of a metropolis chooses to dwell. They
are
the city and
of the city
at the same time, as much alive as museums are dead. So if you want to experience the Singapore of old, come to the Raffles Hotel, as imperial a relic as the Privy Council and as English as bad weather.

Surprisingly for such a colonial icon, the Raffles was a venture by four Armenians, the Sarkies brothers. They purchased a bungalow on Beach Road whose previous ownership history reflects the waxing and waning of fortunes in the raw capitalist atmosphere of the free port. It was originally built by the Dares, a well-known Singaporean-Anglo family who owned one of the four original ship chandlers' firms. There exists a wonderful memoir by George Dare, one of the teenage boys in the family. He used to go off shooting pigeon and wild pig ‘
in the jungly swamps beyond the race course and the Hindoo cremation ground
' – today's Toa Payoh – where he was unsettled by stray dogs devouring three partly burned corpses ‘
slightly grilled and smelling horribly
'. After rats, controlled by Farquhar who paid one
wang
per corpse, and centipedes that fell from the atap roofs, stray dogs were the biggest nuisance in Singapore. On one occasion, a pack of them attacked the boy's pony on the Esplanade and threw him down ‘
dreadfully shaken and stunned
'. Because of such incidents, the first three days of every month were set aside for convict labourers to catch dogs.

Yet even they weren't as dangerous as the tigers who roamed the island. The main casualties were plantation workers who had to work in the outskirts of the jungle: in the 1840s they averaged a casualty a day. Pitfalls, cages with those captured strays as bait and shooting parties decimated the man-eaters, but it took until the dawn of the new century to clear the island completely. Funnily enough, it is then that the most celebrated tiger story pops up for posterity – at Raffles.

It was the proverbial hot and steamy night in August 1902 when the drinking
tuans
in the Raffles Bar and Billiard Room noticed an unwelcome guest – unwelcome not because of its low breeding, but because of its fearsome character: crouching under the billiard table was an adult Bengal tiger. A tiger in the city? Why, it must have swam the Straits of Johore and stridden through the jungle, before it decided to chum it up with the punters in the bar. (‘
Who's that, old boy?
' ‘
A tiger, M'lud
.' ‘
Have we been introduced?
') A crack shot was summoned and the impertinent tiger soon became a trophy as well as providing a cracker of a tale that still delights tourists, combining as it does the stereotypes of imperial derring-do and English sangfroid. The truth is not as dramatic. The billiard room was a pavilion outside the main Raffles Hotel and, like any floodable structure near the waterfront, it stood on four-foot brick pillars to survive the monsoon. The tiger had escaped from a travelling circus and was as tame as can be. Scared and hungry, it found shelter underneath the billiard room, hiding among the stilts. An Indian servant spotted the animal staring through the low veranda railings and informed the management. They, in turn, brought in Mr C. M. Phillips, the schoolmaster at Raffles Institution next door, who shot the beast into legend with his Lee-Enfield rifle. When measured, the animal was found to be 7 feet 8 inches long and 3 feet 4 inches tall.

But back to the Dares: their business went under and their Beach Road house was sold to the Yemeni trader, Syed Mohammed bin Ahmed Alsagoff, a member of a wealthy Arab family who came to Singapore and made his fortune through coconut and lemon grass plantations in what is now Geylang Serai. He also branched into shipping with the Singapore Steaming Company and bought the
Jeddah
, the ship whose voyage in August 1880 caused a sensation as big as that of the
Titanic
some thirty years later.

The
Jeddah,
under Captain Joseph Clark, set sail from Singapore to Saudi Arabia carrying 953 Muslim pilgrims for the hajj. She found herself in the centre of a hurricane in the Arabian Gulf, and started to leak while her boilers became incapacitated. What happened next shocked the merchant navy: Captain Clark and his crew panicked. Leaving the passengers to their fate, they lowered the lifeboats and abandoned ship ignominiously. They were picked up by another vessel, the
Scindia,
and cabled Singapore that the
Jeddah
had foundered. No one would know what had transpired, had the steamer
Antenor
not appeared in time to tow the
Jeddah
expertly to the safety of Aden much to the shock of Captain Clark who had arrived there the day before. The resulting court of inquiry heavily censured Clark, but it was the first officer, 28-year-old Austin Williams, who became the inspiration for Joseph Conrad's
Lord Jim
. Unlike the central character of the novel, Williams – the
real
Lord Jim – did not find redemption among wild tribes in Borneo but worked humbly as a ship chandler in Singapore, living at 32 Barker Road in Bukit Timah, near the present Methodist church. He died of a fall in 1916 and is buried at Bidadari cemetery next to his only son who predeceased him.

The Sarkies brothers bought the bungalow from Alsagoff and extended it with two wings that offered 20 rooms in total. On 1 December 1887 the Raffles Hotel opened for the first time and one of its first guests was Rudyard Kipling, who came up with a double-edged verdict: ‘
Providence conducted me… to a place called Raffles Hotel where the food is excellent and the rooms are bad
.' The principles of marketing being immutable through time and space, the Sarkies Brothers cleverly curtailed the quote to: ‘
Feed at Raffles where the food is excellent
.'