The history of Singapore

Singapore is a small island at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula whose position on the sea lane between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea has shaped its whole history. A trading port called Temasek flourished there in the fourteenth century, before the island faded into a quiet outpost of the Malacca and Johor sultanates. In 1819 the British founded a free port that grew into one of the great entrepôts of Asia, populated by migrants from China, India and the Malay world. After Japanese occupation, a brief union with Malaysia and an unexpected independence in 1965, the city-state transformed itself into one of the richest countries in the world.

The island's first known inhabitants were the Orang Laut, sea peoples who lived from fishing, trade and the waters of the straits, and whose descendants remained part of the local population into the colonial era. Foreign geographers noticed the area early. The Greco-Roman astronomer Ptolemy placed a trading place called Sabana near the tip of the "Golden Chersonese", usually identified with the Malay Peninsula, and a third-century Chinese text mentions an island called Pu Luo Chung, a name that may echo the Malay Pulau Ujong, "the island at the end".

For centuries the straits lay within the orbit of Srivijaya, the Sumatran maritime power that controlled trade between India and China. In 1025 the South Indian Chola dynasty under Rajendra I raided Srivijaya's ports, and later Malay tradition linked a legendary Raja Chulan to Temasek. The Malay Annals tell of a Palembang prince, Sang Nila Utama, who saw a lion-like beast on the island and named his settlement Singapura, "Lion City" in Sanskrit, although scholars regard the story as legend and the true origin of the name is uncertain.

The documentary evidence becomes firmer in the fourteenth century. In 1320 the court of the Yuan dynasty sent a mission to a place called Long Ya Men, the "Dragon's Teeth Gate", probably the strait at today's Keppel Harbour. Around 1330 the Chinese traveller Wang Dayuan described Temasek as having two settlements, one of them on the hill now called Fort Canning, and noted Chinese living there beside the local people. Excavations at Fort Canning since the 1980s have uncovered Chinese porcelain, coins and gold ornaments, confirming that this was a real and prosperous port. The Javanese poem Nagarakretagama of 1365 lists Tumasik among places claimed by Majapahit.

Late in the fourteenth century Singapura was caught between Majapahit and the rising Siamese kingdom of Ayutthaya. Accounts differ: the Malay Annals say a Javanese attack brought the city down, while Portuguese sources describe a Palembang prince, Parameswara, killing a Siamese-appointed ruler and then being driven out. Either way, Parameswara fled north around 1400 and founded Malacca, which became the leading port of the region, received the fleets of the Ming dynasty admiral Zheng He and adopted Islam. The Fort Canning settlement appears to have been abandoned around this time, though a small community lingered on.

Singapore became a minor territory of the Malacca Sultanate. When the Portuguese Empire seized Malacca in 1511, the sultan's court fled south and founded the Sultanate of Johor, which kept an outpost with royal officials at the mouth of the Singapore River. In 1613 a Portuguese force burned it, and for the next two centuries the island had few inhabitants beyond the Orang Laut and passing traders. The region's trade was increasingly dominated by the Dutch Republic, which took Malacca from Portugal in 1641 and tried to monopolise the spice trade from Batavia on Java.

The British East India Company needed a station on the Strait of Malacca to protect the profitable trade between British India and China, which ran past Dutch-controlled ports. In January 1819 Stamford Raffles, lieutenant-governor of Bencoolen in Sumatra, landed on the island and found a small Malay settlement under the Temenggong, a Johor nobleman, along with perhaps a thousand people on the whole island. Exploiting a succession dispute in Johor, Raffles recognised an exiled prince as Sultan Hussein Shah, and on 6 February 1819 the new sultan and the Temenggong signed a treaty allowing the company to build a trading post.

Raffles made Singapore a free port, without customs duties, and traders from across the archipelago flocked there to escape Dutch restrictions. Its first resident, William Farquhar, paid for the settlement partly by licensing opium and gambling, which Raffles opposed; on his return in 1822 Raffles drew up a town plan dividing the settlement into separate districts for Europeans, Chinese, Malays, Indians and other groups, traces of which survive in Chinatown, Kampong Glam and Little India. In 1824 the Anglo-Dutch Treaty divided the Malay world into British and Dutch spheres, and the sultan and Temenggong ceded the island to the company outright in return for payments.

In 1826 Singapore was combined with Penang and Malacca as the Straits Settlements, governed for four decades as an outlying part of British India. The port grew quickly on the China trade, then on steamships, the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the tin and rubber of the Malay states. Chinese migrants, many escaping poverty and the upheavals that followed the First Opium War, formed a majority of the population by the 1840s; most arrived as indentured labourers in a society that was overwhelmingly male. Indian labourers, traders and convicts, Malays, Bugis, Arabs, Armenians, Jews and Europeans made up the rest.

The colonial government was small and neglectful. Disease, overcrowding, opium addiction and the power of Chinese secret societies were serious problems, and in 1850 a city of almost 60,000 people had only a dozen police officers. Merchants lobbied against rule from Calcutta, and in 1867 the Straits Settlements became a Crown colony answerable to the Colonial Office in London. A Chinese Protectorate was set up in 1877 to curb abuses of indentured labour and forced prostitution, and secret societies were banned in 1889.

Singapore became a centre of overseas Chinese politics. Sun Yat-sen visited several times, and in 1906 his revolutionary Tongmenghui opened its Southeast Asian branch there to work against the Qing dynasty. The First World War barely touched the colony, apart from a mutiny of Indian troops in 1915. Between the wars Britain spent heavily on a great naval base at Sembawang, completed in 1939, as a deterrent to Japan; it was designed to receive a fleet that would sail from Europe when needed.

When the Second World War spread to Asia, the Empire of Japan landed in northern Malaya on 8 December 1941, sank the battleships Prince of Wales and Repulse two days later and advanced down the peninsula in under two months. Japanese troops crossed the Johor Strait in early February 1942, and on 15 February Lieutenant-General Arthur Percival surrendered to General Tomoyuki Yamashita. Around 130,000 British, Indian and Australian troops became prisoners, and the fall of a supposedly impregnable fortress gravely damaged British prestige in Asia.

Renamed Syonan-to, "Light of the South", Singapore endured three and a half years of harsh occupation. In the Sook Ching operation of February and March 1942 the Japanese military police screened Chinese men for supposed anti-Japanese sympathies and executed many thousands of them; Singaporean estimates run from about 25,000 to 50,000 dead, far above the figure later admitted by Japan. Food shortages, forced labour and inflation followed, and the British returned only after Japan's surrender in 1945.

The British Military Administration ruled until 1946, when the Straits Settlements were dissolved and Singapore became a separate Crown colony. Elections in 1948 filled only a few seats, and the communist insurgency in Malaya from that year brought emergency laws, including detention without trial, that slowed political change. A new constitution in 1955 created a largely elected assembly, and David Marshall of the Labour Front became chief minister amid strikes and riots. His successor, Lim Yew Hock, cracked down on left-wing unions and negotiated full internal self-government. In the 1959 election the People's Action Party (PAP), led by the Cambridge-educated lawyer Lee Kuan Yew, won 43 of 51 seats, and Lee became the first prime minister.

The PAP government began building public housing, promoting industry and expanding education, but its leaders believed the island could not survive alone and sought union with Malaya. The party's left wing opposed the plan and broke away as the Barisan Sosialis in 1961. A referendum in 1962 approved merger, and in February 1963 the security operation known as Coldstore detained more than a hundred left-wing politicians and activists. On 16 September 1963 Singapore joined Malaya, Sarawak and North Borneo in the new federation of Malaysia.

The union went badly. The PAP and Malaysia's ruling United Malays National Organisation competed in each other's elections, and Lee's campaign for a "Malaysian Malaysia" with equal treatment for all races clashed with constitutional privileges for Malays. Communal riots in July and September 1964 killed dozens of people, while Indonesia waged a campaign of "Confrontation" against the new federation, including a bombing of MacDonald House in Singapore in March 1965. The Malaysian prime minister Tunku Abdul Rahman concluded that separation was the only way to avoid further bloodshed, and on 9 August 1965 the federal parliament in Kuala Lumpur voted to expel Singapore. Lee announced the separation on television in tears.

The new republic joined the United Nations and the Commonwealth in 1965 and co-founded ASEAN with Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand in 1967. Its prospects looked poor: unemployment was over ten per cent, much of the population lived in crowded slums and squatter settlements, and in 1968 Britain announced the withdrawal of its forces, which provided a large share of local jobs. The government introduced national service in 1967 and built up its armed forces with Israeli military advisers.

Under Lee and his finance minister Goh Keng Swee, Singapore courted multinational companies with tax incentives, industrial estates such as Jurong and a disciplined, English-educated workforce, while oil refining, shipping and later electronics and finance became pillars of the economy. The Housing and Development Board rehoused most of the population in public flats within two decades, and compulsory savings in the Central Provident Fund paid for home ownership. Changi Airport opened in 1981, the first metro line in 1987, and by the 1990s Singapore had one of the highest incomes per head in the world. Deng Xiaoping visited in 1978, and China later sent thousands of officials to study its model of state-led growth.

The PAP won every parliamentary seat in each general election from 1968 to 1980. Its critics, at home and abroad, pointed to strict limits on the press and public protest, detention without trial under the Internal Security Act and defamation suits against opposition politicians; the government argued that order and clean administration were the basis of prosperity in a small multiracial state. Lee stepped down in 1990 in favour of Goh Chok Tong, who led the country through the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the SARS epidemic of 2003.

Lee Kuan Yew's eldest son, Lee Hsien Loong, became prime minister in 2004. His years in office saw two casino resorts open in 2010, the 2008 financial crisis, rising debate about immigration and the cost of living, and the PAP's lowest vote share since independence, about 60 per cent, in 2011. Lee Kuan Yew died on 23 March 2015, a few months before the jubilee of independence, and the PAP recovered strongly in that year's election. The COVID-19 pandemic dominated 2020 to 2022, and in 2022 the government announced the repeal of a colonial-era law criminalising sex between men.

On 15 May 2024 Lawrence Wong became the fourth prime minister and the first born after independence. In the 2025 general election the PAP won about 65 per cent of the vote and 87 of 97 seats, with the opposition Workers' Party keeping ten. Today Singapore is a financial, shipping and aviation hub whose population of around six million remains mainly Chinese, Malay and Indian, its history still shaped by the strait that first brought traders to Temasek.