past present for future
A FEW months ago, when some bright spark in Singapore invented a robot which could do a lion dance, there was a suggestion that it might be employed to welcome tourists at Changi airport. This has not yet come to pass but you can see how it conforms to the popular perception of the Lion City itself - sanitised, smart-alecky, faintly ludicrous and with the heart of a machine. At about the same time, elder statesman and Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew announced that falling in love was a Western fantasy.
This, too, could be taken as proof of robotic emotions were it not for the fact that florists can barely cope with the romantic flush which seeps across the island on Valentine's Day, and that lovey-doveyness shows no sign, as yet, of being stamped out.
As such stories might indicate, there's a bit of an identity crisis going on in Singapore and the Tourist Promotion Board isn't entirely sure how to deal with it. A recent advertising campaign posed the question: 'Can a city of the future still let you sleep in the past?' On the one hand, it's happy to extol the virtues of this gleaming citadel of the next millennium - thrusting new tiger, swaggering cock-of-the-walk, miraculous vision and so forth - which grew out of a disease-laden old jungle. On the other hand, visitors rather like being reminded of old jungles. They don't want cholera, exactly, but they enjoy being tickled by romantic frissons of the past.
So the answer to the tourist board's own question, of course, is 'Yes'. History has been dusted down, given a lick of paint and is luring in the punters. Back in 1957, when Singapore was trying to lay its tourist trail, one assemblyman pointed out that visitors came to see precisely three attractions on the island: 'swamplands, some fine buildings and the death houses of Sago Lane'. The death houses, where senior citizens were packed off so that their imminent demise would not bring ill-fortune to the family home, have themselves gone the way of all flesh, but tourism has perked up considerably.
And it's enjoyable. If Singapore is in two minds about whether to look forward or back, the rest of us are similarly hesitant about whether or not it's cool to like the Asian Switzerland - that being the only other country on the globe which is chastised for being too pristine, too organised, too regulated. The average traveller tut-tuts over its perceived sterility on a first visit, begins to see the advantages of cleanliness on a second and by the third trip is positively longing for a place which, to use the appropriate Swiss metaphor, runs like clockwork. When you've lived in Asia for a while, it's refreshing not to fight your way through a horde of hissing hagglers at the airport in order to find a taxi.
If you're staying at The Duxton hotel, in fact, you don't have to do any wrestling at all: they send a London taxi to pick you up. The Duxton is a perfect example of the new old-look Singapore attraction. It was only opened five years ago but it used to be a row of eight turn-of-the-century shophouses in the middle of Tanjong Pagar, a last breath or two away from infamous Sago Lane. Before that it was a nutmeg plantation owned by an Englishman called Duxton.
It reeks of the genteel, unreal past - there is the pleasant sensation of entering a cosy time warp of shuttered windows and half-moon fanlights, attentive staff and hushed conversation, without the inconvenience of dodging opium-dens, raddled gamblers and the gang warfare which used to give Duxton Road a seedy name. Now it's part of a historical conservation area which the Singaporean Government has been sprucing up since the 1980s.