A Peep at the City of Singapore

Could an American boy, like a prince in the Arabian Nights, be taken by a genie from his warm bed in San Francisco or New York and awakened in the centre of Raffles Square, in Singapore, I will wager that he would be sadly puzzled to even give the name of the continent on which he had alighted.

Neither the buildings, the people, or the vehicles would aid him in the least to decide.

Enclosing the four sides of the little banian-tree shaded park in which he stands are rows of brick, white-faced, high-jointed go-downs. Through their glassless windows great white punkahs swing back and forth with a ceaseless regularity. Standing outside of each window, a tall, graceful punkah-wallah tugs at a rattan withe, his naked limbs shining like polished ebony in the fierce glare of the Malayan sun.

For a moment, perhaps, the boy thinks himself in India, possibly at Simla, for he has read some of Rudyard Kipling’s stories.

Back under the portico-like verandas, whose narrow breadths take the place of sidewalks, are little booths that look like bay windows turned inside out. On the floor of each sits a Turk, cross-legged, or an Arab, surrounded by a heterogeneous assortment of wares, fez caps, brass finger-bowls, a praying rug, a few boxes of Japanese tooth-picks, some rare little bottles of Arab essence, a betel-nut box, and a half dozen piles of big copper cents, for all shopkeepers are money-changers.

The merchant gathers his flowing party-colored robes about him, tightens the turban head, and draws calmly at his water-pipe while a bevy of Hindu and Tamil women bargain for a new stud for their noses, a showy amulet, or a silver ring for their toes.

Squatting right in the way of all passers is a Chinese travelling restaurant that looks like two flour barrels, one filled with drawers, the other containing a small charcoal fire. The old cookee, with his queue tied neatly up about his shaven head, takes a variety of mixtures from the drawers, bits of dried fish, seaweed, a handful of spaghetti, possibly a piece of shark’s fin, or better still a lump of bird’s nest, places them in the kettle, as he yells from time to time, “Machen, machen” (eating, eating).

Next to the Arab booth is a Chinese lamp shop, then a European dry-goods store, an Armenian law office, a Japanese bazaar, a foreign consulate.

A babble of strange sounds and a jargon of languages salute the astonished boy’s ears.

In the broad well-paved streets about him a Malay syce, or driver, is trying to urge his spotted Deli pony, which is not larger than a Newfoundland dog, in between a big, lumbering two-wheeled bullock-cart, laden with oozing bags of vile-smelling gambier, and a great patient water buffalo that stands sleepily whipping the gnats from its black, almost hairless hide, while its naked driver is seated under the trees in the square quarrelling and gambling by turns.

The gharry, which resembles a dry-goods box on wheels, set in with latticed windows, smashes up against the ponderous hubs of the bullock-cart. The meek-eyed bullocks close their eyes and chew their cuds, regardless of the fierce screams of the Malay or the frenzied objurgations of their driver.

But no one pays any attention to the momentary confusion. A party of Jews dressed in robes of purple and red that sweep the street pass by, without giving a glance at the wild plunging of the half-wild pony. A Singhalese jeweller is showing his rubies and cat’s-eyes to a party of Eurasian, or half-caste clerks, that are taking advantage of their master’s absence from the godown to come out into the court to smoke a Manila cigarette and gossip. The mottled tortoise-shell comb in the vender’s black hair, and his womanish draperies, give him a feminine aspect.

An Indian chitty, or money-lender, stands talking to a brother, supremely unconscious of the eddying throng about. These chitties are fully six feet tall, with closely shaven heads and nude bodies. Their dress of a few yards of gauze wound about their waists, and red sandals, would not lead one to think that they handle more money than any other class of people in the East. They borrow from the great English banks without security save that of their caste name, and lend to the Eurasian clerks just behind them at twelve per cent a month. If a chitty fails, he is driven out of the caste and becomes a pariah. The caste make up his losses.

Dyaks from Borneo idle by. Parsee merchants in their tall, conical hats, Chinese rickshaw runners and cart coolies, Tamil road-menders, Bugis, Achinese, Siamese, Japanese, Madras serving-men, negro firemen, Lascar sailors, throng the little square, the agora of the commercial life of the city.

Such is Singapore, embracing all the races of Asia and Europe. Is it any wonder that the American boy is bewildered, standing there under the great banian tree with a Malay in sarong and kris by his side, singing with his syrah-stained lips the glorious promises of the Koran?

Look on the map of Asia for the southernmost point of the continent, and you will find it at the tip of the Malay Peninsula, a giant finger that points down into the heart of the greatest archipelago in the world. At the very end of this peninsula, like a sort of cut-off joint of the finger, is the little island of Singapore, which is not over twenty-five miles from east to west, and does not exceed fifteen miles in width at its broadest point.

The famous old Straits of Malacca, which were once the haunts of the fierce Malayan pirates, separate the island from the mainland and the Sultanate of Johore.

The shipping that once worked its way through these narrow straits, in momentary fear that its mangrove-bound shores held a long, swift pirate prau, now goes further south and into the island-guarded harbor before Singapore.

Nothing can be more beautiful than the sea approach to Singapore. As you enter the Straits, the emerald-green of a bevy of little islands obstructs the vision, and affords a grateful relief to the almost blinding glare of the Malayan sky, and the metallic reflections of the ocean.

Some seem only inhabited by a graceful waving burden of strange, tropical foliage, and by a band of chattering monkeys; on others you detect a Malay kampong, or village, its umbrella-like houses of attap, close down to the shore, built high up on poles, so that half the time their boulevards are but vast mud-holes, the other half Venice, filled with a moving crowd of sampans and fishing praus. A crowd of bronzed, naked little figures sport within the shadow of a maze of drying nets, and flee in consternation as the black, log-like head and cruel, watchful eyes of a crocodile glide quietly along the mangrove roots.

On another island you discern the grim breastworks and the frowning mouth of a piece of heavy ordnance.

Soon the island of Singapore reveals itself in a long line of dome-like hills and deep-cut shadows, whose stolid front quickly dissolves. The tufted tops of a sentinel palm, the wide-spreading arms of the banian, clumps of green and yellow bamboo, and the fan-shaped outlines of the traveller’s palm become distinguishable. As the great, red, tropical sun rises from behind the encircling hills, the monotony of the foliage is relieved in places by objects which it all but hid from view. The granite minaret of the Mohammedan mosque, the carved dome of a Buddhist temple, the slender spire of an English cathedral, the bold projections of Government House, and the wide, white sides of the Municipal buildings all hold the eye.

Then a maze of strange shipping screens the nearing shore the military masts and yards of British and Dutch men-of-war, the high-heeled, shoe-like lines of Chinese junks, innumerable Malay and Kling sampans, and great, unwieldy Borneo tonkangs.

For six miles along the wharves and for six miles back into the island extend the municipal limits of the city. Two hundred thousand people live within these limits; while outside, over the rest of the island along the sea-coast, in fishing villages, and in the interior on plantations of tapioca and pepper, live a hundred thousand more. Of these three hundred thousand over one hundred and seventy thousand are Chinese and only fifteen hundred are Europeans.

Grouped about Raffles Square, and facing the Bund, are the great English, German, and Chinese houses that handle the three hundred million dollars’ worth of imports and exports that pass in and out of the port yearly, and make Singapore one of the most important marts of the commercial world.

Beyond, and back from the Square, is Tanglin, or the suburbs, where the government officials and the heads of these great firms live in luxurious bungalows, surrounded by a swarm of retainers.

Let us drive from Raffles Square through this cosmopolitan city and out to Tanglin. Beginning at Cavanagh Bridge, at one end of which stands the great Singapore Club and the Post Office, is the ocean esplanade, the pride of the city. It encloses a public playground of some fifteen acres, reclaimed from the sea at an expense of over two hundred thousand dollars. Every afternoon when the heat of the day has fallen from 150 deg. to 80 deg., the European population meets on this esplanade park to play tennis, cricket, and football, and to promenade, gossip, and listen to the music of the regimental or man-of-war band.

The drive from the sea, up Orchard Road to the Botanic Gardens, carries you by all the diversified life of the city. The Chinese restaurant is omnipresent. By its side sits a naked little bit of bronze, with a basket of sugar-cane each stick, two feet long, cleaned and scraped, ready for the hungry and thirsty rickshaw coolies, who have a few quarter cents with which to gratify their appetites. On every veranda and in every shady corner are the Kling and Chinese barbers. They carry their barber-shops in a kit or in their pockets, and the recipient of their skill finds a seat as best he may. The barber is prepared to shave your head, your face, trim your hair, braid your queue, and pull the hairs out of your nose and ears.

There is no special quarter for separate trades. Madras tailor shops rub shoulders with Malay blacksmith shops, while Indian wash-houses join Manila cigar manufactories.

Once past the commercial part of the ride, the great bungalows of the European and Chinese merchants come into view. The immediate borders of the road itself reveal nothing but a dense mass of tropical verdure and carefully cut hedges, but at intervals there is a wide gap in the hedge, and a road leads off into the seeming jungle. At every such entrance there are posts of masonry, and a plate bearing the name of the manor and its owner.

At the end of a long aisle of palms and banians you see a bit of wide-spreading veranda, and the full-open doors of a cool, black interior. Acres of closely shaven lawns, dotted with flowering shrubs of the brightest reds, deepest purples, and fieriest solferinos, beds of rich-hued foliage plants, and cool, green masses of ferns meet your eye.

Perhaps you spy the inevitable tennis-court, swarming with players, and bordered with tables covered with tea and sweets. Red-turbaned Malay kebuns, or gardeners, are chasing the balls, and scrupulously clean Chinese “boys” are passing silently among the guests with trays of eatables.

Dozens of gharries dodge past. Hundreds of rickshaws pull out of the way.

A great landau, drawn by a pair of thoroughbred Australian horses, driven by a Malay syce, and footman in full livery, and containing a bare-headed Chinese merchant, in the simple flowing garments of his nation, dashes along. The victoria and the dog-cart of the European, and the universal palanquin of the Anglo-Indian, form a perfect maze of wheels.

Suddenly the road is filled with a long line of bullock-carts. You swing your little pony sharply to one side, barely escaping the big wooden hub of the first cart. The syce springs down from behind, and belabors the native bullock driver, who, paying no attention to the blows rained upon his naked back, belabors his beasts in turn, calling down upon their ungainly humps the curses of his religion. The scene is so familiar that only a “globe-trotter” would notice it. Yet to me there is nothing more truly artistic, or more typically Indian in India, than a long line of these bullock-carts, laden with the products of the tropics, pineapples, bananas, gambier, coffee, urged on by a straight, graceful driver, winding slowly along a palm and banian shaded road. We would meet such processions at every turning, but never without recalling glorious childish pictures of the Holy Land and Bible scenery as we painted them, while our father read of a Sunday morning out of the old “Domestic Bible,” we children pronounce it “Dom-i-stick,” how the Lord said unto Moses, “Go take twenty fat bullocks and offer them as a sacrifice.” As we would see these “twenty fat bullocks” time and again, I confess, with a feeling of reluctance, that some of the gilt and rose tint was rubbed from our childish pictures, and that a realistic artist drawing from the life before him would not deck out the patient subject in quite our extravagant colors.

The color of the Indian bullock varies. Some are a dirty white, some a cream color, some almost pink, and a few are of the darker shades. They are about the size of our cows, seldom as large as a full-grown ox. Their horns, which are generally tipped with curiously carved knobs, and often painted in colors, are as diversified in their styles of architecture as are the horns of our cattle, though they are more apt to be straight and V-shaped. Their necks are always “bowed to the yoke,” to once more use biblical phraseology, and seem almost to invite its humiliating clasp. Above their front legs is the mark of their antiquity, the great clumsy, flabby, fleshy, tawny hump, always swaying from side to side, keeping time to every plodding step of its sleepy owner. This seemingly useless mountain of flesh serves as a cushion against which rests a yoke. Not the natty yoke of our rural districts, but a simple pole, with a pin of wood through each end, to ride on the outside of the bullocks’ necks. The burden comes against the projecting hump when the team pulls. To the centre of this yoke is tied, with strong withes of rattan, the pole of a cart, that in this nineteenth century is generally only to be seen in national museums, preserved as a relic of the first steps in the art of wagon building. And yet as a cart it is not to be despised: all the heavy traffic of the colonies is done within its rude board sides. It has two wheels, with heavy square spokes that are held on to a ponderous wooden axle-tree by two wooden pins. A platform bottom rests on the axle-tree, and two fence-like sides.

The genie of the cart, the hewer of wood and drawer of water, is a tall, wiry, bronze-colored Hindu. He has a yard of white gauze about his waist, and another yard twisted up into a turban on his head. The dictates of fashion do not interest him. He does not plod along year in and year out behind his team for the pittance of sixty cents per day, to squander on the outside of his person. Not he. He has a wife up near Simla. He hopes to go back next year, and buy a bit of ground back from the hill on the Allabadd road from his father-in-law, old Mohammed Mudd. They have cold weather up in Simla, and he knows of a certain gown he is going to buy of a Chinaman in the bazaar. But his bullocks lag, and he saws on the gamooty rope that is attached to their noses, and beats them half consciously with his rattan whip. Ofttimes he will stand stark upright in the cart for a full half-hour, with his rattan held above his head in a threatening attitude, and talk on and on to his animals, apotheosizing their strength and patience, telling them how they are sacred to Buddha, how they are the companions of man, and how they shall have an extra chupa of paddy when the sun goes down, and he has delivered to the merchant sahib on the quay his load of gambier; or he reproves them for their slowness and want of interest, and threatens them with the rod, and tells them to look how he holds it above them. If in the course of the harangue one of the dumb listeners pauses to pick a mouthful of young lallang grass by the roadside, the softly crooning tones give place to a shriek of denunciation.

The agile Kling springs down from his improvised pulpit, and rushes at the offender, calls him the offspring of a pariah dog, shows him the rattan, rubs it against his nose, threatening to cut him up with it into small pieces, and to feed the pieces to the birds. Then he discharges a volley of blows on the sleek sides of the offender, that seem to have little more effect than to raise a cloud of tiger gnats, and to cause the recipient to bite faster at the tender herbs.

As the bullock-cart that has blocked our way, and at the same time inspired this description, shambles along down the shady road, and out of the reach of the syce’s arms, the driver slips quietly up the pole of the cart until a hand rests on either hump, and commences to talk in a half-aggrieved, half-caressing tone to his team. Our syce translates. “He say bullock very bad to go to sleep before the palanquin of the Heaven-Born. If they no be better soon, their souls will no become men. He say he sorry that they make the great American sahib angry.”

The singular trio passes on, the driver praising and reprimanding by turns in the soft, musical tongue of his people, the historic beasts swinging lazily along, regardless of their illustrious past, all unconscious of the fact that their names are embalmed in sacred writ and Indian legend, and rounding a corner of the broad, red road, are lost to view amid the olive-green shadows of a clump of gently swaying bamboo. To me, for the moment, they seem to disappear, like phantoms, into the mists of the dim centuries, from out of which my imagination has called them forth.

Soon you are at the wide-open gates of the Botanic Garden. A perfect riot of strange tropical foliage bursts upon the view. The clean, red road winds about and among avenues of palms, waringhans, dark green mangosteens, casuarinas, and the sweet-smelling hibiscus, all alike covered with a hundred different parasitic vines and ferns. Artificial lakes and moats are filled with the giant pods of the superb Victoria regia, and the flesh-colored cups of the lotus.

In the translucent green twilight of the flower-houses a hundred varieties of the costly orchids thrive not costly here. A shipload can be bought of the natives for three cents apiece.

Walks carry you out into the dim aisles of the native jungle. Monkeys, surprised at your footsteps, spring from limb to limb, and swing, chattering, out of sight in a mass of rubber-vines. Splendid macadamized roads, that are kept in perfect repair by a force of naked Hindus and an iron roller drawn by six unwilling, hump-backed bullocks, spread out over the island in every direction. Leave one at any point outside the town, and plunge into the bordering jungle, and you are liable to meet a tiger or a herd of wild boar. The tigers swim across the straits from the mainland, and occasionally strike down a Chinaman. It is said that if a Chinaman, a Malay, and a European are passing side by side through a field, the tiger will pick out the Chinaman to the exclusion of the other two.

Acres upon acres of pineapples stretch away on either hand, while patches of bananas and farms of coffee are interspersed with spice trees and sago swamps.

This road system is the secret of the development of the agriculture, and one of the secrets of the rapid growth of the great English colonies. Were it not for the great black python, that lies sleeping in the road in front of you, or the green iguana that hangs in a timboso tree over your head, or a naked runner pulling a rickshaw, you might think you were travelling the wide asphaltum streets of Washington.

The home of the European in Singapore is peculiar to the country. The parks about their great bungalows are small copies of the Botanic Gardens filled with all that is beautiful in the flora of the East. From five to twenty servants alone are kept to look after its walks and hedges and lawns.

A bungalow proper may consist of but a half-dozen rooms, and yet look like a vast manor house. It is the generous sweep of the verandas running completely around the house that lends this impression. Behind its bamboo chicks you retire on your return from the office. The Chinese “boy” takes your pipe-clayed shoes and cork helmet, and brings a pair of heelless grass slippers. If a friend drop in, you never think of inviting him into your richly furnished drawing-room, but motion him to a long rattan chair, call “Boy, bring the master a cup of tea,” and pass a box of Manila cigars.

Bungalows are one story high, with a roof of palm thatch, and are raised above the ground from two to five feet by brick pillars, leaving an open space for light and air beneath. Nearly every day it rains for an hour in torrents. The hot, steaming earth absorbs the water, and the fierce equatorial sun evaporates it, only to return it in a like shower the next day. So every precaution must be taken against dampness and dry-rot.

In every well-ordered bungalow seven to nine servants are an absolute necessity, while three others are usually added from time to time. The five elements, if I may so style them, are the “boy,” or boys, the cook and his helpers, the horseman, the water-carrier, the gardener, and the maid. The adjuncts are the barber, the wash man, the tailor, and the watchman. In a mild way, you are at the mercy of these servants. Their duties are fixed by caste, one never intruding on the work of another. You must have all or none. Still this is no hardship. Only newcomers ever think, of trying to economize on servant bills. The record of the thermometer is too appalling, and you speedily become too dependent on their attentions.

The Chinese “boy” he is always the “boy” until he dies is the presiding genius of the house. He it is who brings your tea and fruit to the bedside at 6 A.M., and lays out your evening suit ready for dinner, puts your studs in your clean shirt, brings your slippers, knows where each individual article of your wardrobe is kept, and, in fact, thinks of a hundred and one little comforts you would never have known of, had he not discovered them. He is your valet de chambre, your butler, your steward and your general agent, your interpreter and your directory. He controls the other servants with a rod of iron, but bows to the earth before the mem, or the master. For his ten Mexican dollars a month he takes all the burdens from your shoulders, and stands between you and the rude outside polyglot world. He is a hero-worshipper, and if you are a Tuan Besar great man he will double his attentions, and spread your fame far and wide among his brother majordomos.

But a description of each member of the menage and their duties would be in a large measure the description of the odd, complex life of the East.

The growth of Singapore since its founding by Sir Stamford Raffles in 1819 would do honor to the growth of one of our Western cities.

Within three months after the purchase of the ground from the Sultan of Johore, Raffles wrote to Lord Warren Hastings, the Governor:

“We have a growing colony of nearly five thousand souls,” and a little later one of his successors wrote apologetically to Lord Auckland, discussing some project relating to Singapore finance;

“These details may appear to your Lordship petty, but then everything connected with these settlements is petty, except their annual surplus cost to the Government of India.”

To-day the city and colony has a population of over one million, and a revenue of five million dollars a magnificent monument to its founder’s foresight!

From a commercial and strategic stand-point, the site of the city is unassailable. When the English and the Dutch divided the East Indies by drawing a line through the Straits of Malacca, the English to hold all north, the Dutch all south, the crafty Dutchman smiled benignly, with one finger in the corner of his eye, and went back to his coffee and tobacco trading in the beautiful islands of Java and Sumatra, pitying the ignorance of the Englishman, who was contented with the swampy jungles of an unknown and savage neck of land, little thinking that inside of a half century all his products would come to this same despised district for a market, while his own colonies would retrograde and gradually pass into the hands of the English.

Singapore is one of the great cities of the world, the centre of all the East Indian commerce, the key of southern Asia, and one of the massive links in the armored chain with which Great Britain encircles the globe.