Singapore

Tell a malaysian you've been to Singapore and you always get the same response - "ah Singapore, it's so clean."  This is said with an approving nod, but there is something at the back of the eyes that betrays a different emotion, something like "how the hell do you keep a country that clean?"  For malaysians going to Singapore is like visiting the home of an obsessive and domineering housewife, where you are scared to sit down in case you ruffle the cushions.  The feeling is definitely mutual - try reading the reviews on "trip adviser" of malaysian hotels by singaporean visitors, they are usually patronising and plaintive - "the room was dirty", "the service was poor", "there was mould in the bathroom", etc, etc.

Sue and I spent a few days there last week before travelling on to the malaysian island of Tioman.  I wanted to go more for its connection to the British Empire than for the shopping.  Singapore was the asian jewel in the crown dominating the Straits of Malacca, the throbbing artery of East-West trade.  The fall of Singapore in 1942 sounded the death knell of the Empire, because in the space of a few weeks the aura of white invicibility simply evaporated.  The british dropped "the white man's burden" like a shot on the quayside and elbowed their way onto the departing ships, leaving chinese militiamen to throw off their british uniforms and run home in their underwear for fear of being caught by the japanese.

Singapore is certainly clean and well run.  The parks are manicured and the underground trains hiss smoothly into the stations behind protective walls of perspex.  The downtown malls have all your favourite shops from Prada to Marks and Spencer and the streets are alive with the throaty roar of Lamborghinis.  Raffles Hotel is still there, perhaps more as a brand than in spirit and the whole place is a banker's paradise.  And yet, there is something of a siege mentality, a bit like I imagine existed in West Berlin.  Logically Singapore should be part of Malaysia and the singaporeans threw themselves enthusiastically into the Malaysian Federation in 1963, only to be given the bum's rush in 1965, for being too socialist and too chinese.  Since then it's been a city state with something to prove, the size of the Isle of Wight with a population of 4.5 million, economically interdependent with peninsular Malaysia, but forced to eye its bigger and poorer neighbour nervously across the Straits.

Waiting for our bus out of Singapore at 6.00am in a tatty edge of town mall we got to see a different side of the city.  We ate our rice and noodles cheek by jowl with hungover johns and exhausted hookers, some with remarkably big feet and adam's apples, and many with the distinctive twitch of the regular drugs user.  But then I guess in this city of traders and bankers, people are just one more commodity.