Singapore
Winning back tourists
Street hawkers, chewing gum, even bogus brothels are being used to lure visitors in the wake of Sars. Jill Hartley. London Times.
Nov 16, 2003

YOU CAN find prostitution, gambling, drugs and violence in any of the world's major cities, as long as you know where to look, but you don't expect to find all four bang in the centre of a tourist hotspot in squeegee-clean Singapore.

But the city is changing, and suddenly the tourist board has realised that its seedy past is as marketable as its marbled shopping malls. As a result the Chinatown Heritage Centre, opened last year, tells it like it was for Chinese immigrants in the early 1900s.

They were forced to live in squalid rat-infested cubicles in shophouses, so called because the living quarters doubled up during the day as businesses, not all of them as wholesome as the reconstruction of a tailor's shop in the museum.

Move up a floor and there's a lifelike interpretation of the "Four Evils" - opium, prostitution, gambling and secret societies - in which the workers, many separated from their families, sought solace from hard labour and loneliness. Louis, our Singapore Tourist Board guide, proudly pointed to the mock-up of a prostitute's bedroom - brothels were legal until 1930 - with its bit-too-obvious red light and beaded curtain.

He also showed us a mah-jong table with opium pipes and a blood-soaked dagger, depicting a grisly end, following a fight over gambling debts.

I'd asked for a guided tour of Singapore's new cultural attractions, thinking mainly of the new £200 million Esplanade Arts Centre on Marina Bay, but the gory tableaux in the Chinatown museum were clearly Louis's favourite and he insisted we went there first.

Standing afterwards in the numbing midday heat of the street, surrounded by gimcrack tourist shops selling everything from Singapore Airlines air stewardess uniforms to ceremonial swords, he said the city was finally facing up to its mistakes.

"We listened to our visitors and they told us we'd cleaned Chinatown up too much. We looked around and realised that it was boring and soulless. We had to admit that we'd been wrong, so we encouraged food vendors to open in the old shophouses and we have brought back the street hawkers we'd banned."

This time the hawkers are licensed and wear plastic name tags, but it's best not to be too cynical as the Government is losing some of its nanny-state daftness.

Witness the recent lifting of the ban on chewing gum. What next? Litter? Raunchy dancers and blatant bacchanalia? It won't happen, but it's a strange visitor who doesn't appreciate clean streets, hygienic food stalls, polite taxi drivers and bars where you can safely take the family.

When I visited last winter, Singapore's festive spirits had been dampened by the Bali bombing. Now, post-Sars, it faces a tougher challenge: how to persuade tourists, conference organisers and investors to come back.

To that end it launched the Singapore Roars campaign, which runs until the end of the year, offering discounts on dining, shopping, events and attractions.

Despite the setbacks the city, long dismissed as a cultural desert, believes it is on the threshold of a renaissance as it strives to become the arts hub of South-East Asia.

True, the official map lists 115 shopping centres and only 42 places of interest, but the new Esplanade complex should convince any sceptic that Singapore can do icon architecture as well as Sydney or Bilbao.

Locals refer to its twin spiked domes affectionately as "The Durians", because they remind them of the popular, smelly South-East Asian fruit.

It's an acquired taste, therefore an apt comparison for such a bravely surreal building, which has also been described as flies' eyes, twin microphones, pineapple halves and jewelled turtles.

Within the curved protective glass shells, covered in a lattice of angular metallic sunshades, are a 2,000-seat theatre and 1,800-seat concert hall surrounded by the inevitable shopping malls, car parks and restaurants.

As well as having the daring, and the wealth, to shock with the new, Singapore holds a better record than its cousins Hong Kong and Bangkok when it comes to imaginative use of the old.

It took ten years to rejuvenate the river front, converting abandoned warehouses into a Covent Garden-style bustle of fashionable shops, bars and restaurants.

If you want colonial nostalgia, Singapore also does it better than the rest. A new wing of the Asian Civilisations Museum opened in May in a restored colonial building at Empress Place.

The Victoria Theatre with its statue of Stamford Raffles stands as proud as ever, even though the Symphony Orchestra has decamped to the Esplanade, and you can almost hear the clink of pink gins as you stroll round the Padang, a rare piece of city-centre turf, dominated by the Singapore Cricket Club.

Still think it's just a boring shopping stop? Then take the MRT to Raffles Place in the heart of the financial district. Walk north towards Clifford Pier and the river front dominated by the five-star Fullerton Hotel, a 1920s gem with several past lives as the Post Office, Chamber of Commerce, Stock Exchange, and most recently, the Inland Revenue Authority.

Inside it's just another expensive Asian hotel but outside its columns dazzle, making it one of the world's most stunning landmark hotels. A swim in its horizon-edge pool, watching the brokers playing dice with the world's money in neighbouring smoky glass office blocks, is one of its greatest draws.

For me the rogue banker Nick Leeson, who brought down Barings, did Singapore a favour, adding a frisson of danger and dash to a dull stick-it-for-two-years job in what has always been considered a money-obsessed city.

Walk a few minutes from the Fullerton to Boat Quay, where he did his drinking in Harry's Bar, and you could see a fledgeling dollar billionaire in the making.

On our last night we joined the tourists and expat workers strolling along the quayside. As we paused in front of a bar called PHAT the owner rushed out, pumped our hands and said: "It stands for Pretty Hot And Tempting."

We tried not to laugh as he looked so proud, so we dropped in for a beer. It was as tame and innocuous as we expected, but for Singapore it signals progress.
London Times