The Accidental City: From Mudflat to Metropolis in 60 Years

The hot air in the Singapore City Hall press conference room felt thick enough to chew on August 9, 1965, the kind of humid, still air that clings to the back of your shirt and makes the fluorescent lights hum a little louder than they should. At the front of the room, 28-year-old Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew adjusted the microphone, his jaw tight, the lines around his eyes deeper than they had been just 48 hours earlier, when he had still believed the separation from the Federation of Malaysia was a nightmare he would wake up from. The room was packed with local and foreign journalists, their cameras clicking like firecrackers, their notebooks open, waiting for the man who had led the People’s Action Party (PAP) to a landslide victory in the 1963 Malaysian general election just two years prior to explain how his country had gone from a state of the federation to a stateless nation in the span of a single afternoon.

The separation had not been a negotiation. It had been a ultimatum. On August 7, Malaysian Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman had told Lee that the PAP’s efforts to contest seats in the Malay-dominated states of the federation, and its push for a “Malaysian Malaysia” platform that rejected the special privileges granted to the Malay ethnic majority under the country’s constitution, were an existential threat to the political power of the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), the dominant party in the ruling coalition. The PAP, Tunku said, had to abandon its cross-state political ambitions, or Singapore would be expelled from the federation. Lee had refused, and two days later, Tunku had announced on national radio that Singapore was no longer part of Malaysia, effective immediately. Lee’s own cabinet had learned of the decision from the radio broadcast, minutes before the rest of the world. When a reporter in the City Hall press conference room stood up and asked, “Prime Minister, do you think Singapore can survive as an independent nation?” Lee fell silent for ten full seconds, his throat bobbing as he fought back tears. When he spoke, his voice was quiet, but carried to the back of the room without the microphone. “We have no natural resources, no hinterland, barely enough freshwater to drink. We have to make it on our own. There is no other option.” A single tear traced a path down his cheek, and he brushed it away with the back of his hand, as if angry at himself for showing weakness. The room was silent for a moment, then erupted in applause—half out of respect, half out of sheer disbelief at the absurdity of the situation.

Three kilometers away, in the wooden kampung of Bukit Ho Swee, 28-year-old Ah Chan had no idea the press conference was happening. He was too busy waiting in line at the public water tap, two rusted iron buckets slung over his shoulder, his feet caked in the red mud that defined every lane in the kampung. The water only ran for two hours every morning, and the line stretched 50 meters down the dirt road, filled with women and children holding plastic pails and metal pots, bickering good-naturedly as they waited. Ah Chan’s 8-year-old daughter Mei was not in line. She was barefoot, her hair tied back with a scrap of blue cloth, kneeling in the mud next to a pile of trash, picking out empty glass bottles and plastic wrappers to take to the scrap collector for a few cents each. A week earlier, she had found an empty Coca-Cola bottle, the kind that was still a rare luxury in 1965 Singapore, and had traded it for 10 cents—enough to buy three coconut ice lollies for her and her two older siblings. She still talked about it at dinner, her eyes bright as she described the cold, sweet taste of the lolly melting on her tongue.

Ah Chan’s wife Lian was sitting on a low wooden stool outside their rented hut, mending a tear in a child’s shirt with a needle and thread, her fingers calloused from years of sewing and washing clothes in the polluted Kallang River. The hut was 12 square meters, made of wooden planks patched with corrugated iron, with a thatched roof that leaked every time it rained. Underneath the hut, a family of pigs rooted through the mud, and a dozen chickens pecked at scraps of rice. There was no toilet in the hut; the entire kampung shared a row of wooden outhouses built over a ditch that flowed into the river, with no sewage system to speak of. At night, the family lit a kerosene lamp, the smoky flame casting flickering shadows on the walls as the children did their homework—if they were still in school. Ah Chan’s 12-year-old son Wei had dropped out of primary school two years earlier, to work as a casual laborer at the nearby docks, carrying crates of goods for 50 cents a day. The money was not enough to feed the family of five, but it was better than nothing.

Ah Chan had worked at the docks for 10 years, first under the British colonial administration, then after Singapore joined Malaysia in 1963. But after the merger, the Malaysian government had shifted most of its trade to the larger, deeper port of Port Klang, near Kuala Lumpur, and the volume of cargo passing through Singapore’s wharves had dropped by 40%. Ah Chan was lucky to get three days of work a week;

The weight of those three empty workdays settled on Ah Chan’s shoulders heavier than the iron buckets he carried. By late August 1965, the docks had cut his shifts to two days a week, the cargo volume dropping so low that foremen rotated crews just to keep a skeleton staff on payroll. His 120 new dollars a month in earnings, already stretched thin to cover the 30-dollar rent for their leaky hut, the 40 dollars for rice and dried fish, and the 15 dollars for his mother’s diabetes medicine, now shrank to 80. Lian had started taking in laundry from the neighboring kampung, washing clothes in the polluted Kallang River for 10 cents a load, her fingers raw and chapped by the end of each day, but even that extra 20 dollars a month barely covered the gap. Mei’s scrap collection brought in another 5 dollars on a good week, enough for a few extra lollies or a packet of biscuits for the children, but it was not enough to stop Wei from coming home from the docks one afternoon with a split lip and a black eye, his 50 cents for the day stolen by a trio of older boys from a rival kampung. “I don’t want to go back,” he told Ah Chan that night, his voice muffled by a cloth pressed to his face, and Ah Chan had no answer for him. He knew the docks were dangerous, that casual laborers were paid last and fired first, but there was no other work. The only factory within walking distance of Bukit Ho Swee was a small cigarette factory that paid 30 cents a day for child labor, and the waiting list for a job there was 200 names long.

The kampung itself felt like a tinderbox in those weeks. Two years earlier, in May 1961, a fire had swept through the eastern edge of Bukit Ho Swee, burning down 400 wooden huts and leaving 4,000 people homeless in the span of 45 minutes. Ah Chan’s family had been spared only because their hut was on the western edge, surrounded by a strip of rubber trees that slowed the flames, but the memory of the fire hung over every lane: the narrow dirt roads that wound between huts, the piles of dry palm fronds and scrap wood stacked outside every door, the kerosene lamps that lit every home at night, the open flames used for cooking that could jump to a thatched roof in seconds. The fire had been the final push that convinced the colonial government to set up the Housing and Development Board (HDB) in 1960, but the board’s early efforts had been slow: by 1965, it had built only 12,000 units of public housing, a fraction of the 250,000 people living in kampungs across the island. Most of the new units were in Queenstown, a drab, concrete neighborhood on the southern edge of the island that was derided by kampung residents as “Siberia” for its distance from the city center and its lack of the open space and community ties that defined kampung