Tourism in Slump : Tiny Singapore Tries to Restore Its Exotic Image

In her 37th-floor offices atop Raffles City, one of Singapore’s newest monuments to modernity, Pamelia Lee spoke with certainty about her country’s image.

“To the region,” Lee said, “we are the New York. For Americans and Europeans, we’re part of the exotic East. And for the northern Asians (Japanese, Koreans), we are the tropics--clean and green. We are unique.”

It is a positive attitude, as might be expected from a woman who directs product development for the Singapore Tourist Promotion Board and who, incidentally, is the sister-in-law of the country’s strong-willed prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew.

But just three years ago, a government report shocked Singapore with a different appraisal. The city, it said, had developed a “negative image,” the result of “the vanishing mystique and romance sought by visitors from developed countries and the unfulfilled fun and excitement desired by regional visitors.” Fading character and little night life added up to one word--boring.

The government ordered more studies. One conclusion: Save the exotic East. Preserve and renovate what was left of historic Chinatown, Little India, Arab Street and other tourist draws. Something had to be done.

Gone were the days of the 1970s and early 1980s, when the government could count on a 10% annual increase in tourists, on foreigners who kept hotel occupancy rates at around 90% and left behind in Singapore nearly 15% of the country’s foreign exchange earnings.

Tourists of that period began the pilgrimage to the shops of Orchard Road, picking through the region’s finest collection of luxury imports. Singapore was known as a place to get a good deal.

Petroleum fueled the economy of the island nation, a refinery and shipbuilding center and then home base for 15,000 foreign “oilies” and their families who came to drill offshore in Southeast Asia. At beer joints around town, a fair Texas two-step was played by countrified bands such as Mathew and the Mandarins.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Lee’s government was swinging the wrecker’s ball, leveling the old two-story family shophouses (store on the ground floor, living quarters above) to make way for office blocks. Lower-income residents were moved out of the city center in a revolutionary program of public and private high-rise housing.

“We just woke up one morning and discovered we were a big city,” a longtime foreign businessman said. “Shenton Way had become the Wall Street of Asia. The old areas had been leveled for development. Chinatown? It was somebody else’s artifact.”

Developing Singapore had Asia’s second-highest standard of living, behind Japan, but recession was on the way. Oil prices slumped, and the oilies went home. Hotels, which had been overbuilt in anticipation of a growing flood of tourists, began a rate war that continues today, with occupancy rates at 65%. Tourist earnings dropped. The government began to worry and ordered more studies.

Going After Tourists

As a result, the authorities in 1986 earmarked $459 million for a five-year program to bring back the tourists. Included are plans to develop:

Beaches on smaller offshore islands. Singapore, just 17 miles wide and 28 miles long, has no beaches that can compare with those of neighboring Malaysia, Thailand or the Philippines.

The Singapore River, which, until a few years ago, was a filthy but colorful center of commerce where bumboats brought cargo ashore from freighters anchored offshore. Tourist officials mention a concept along the lines of the River Walk in San Antonio.

Improvements in existing attractions, such as British colonial buildings; the Tiger Balm Gardens, a park filled with garish plaster figures depicting scenes from Asian myths and popular stories, and plans for new ones such as powerboat races, orchid farms and a theme park.

But none has been so widely discussed as the preservation program. The government is putting $86 million of its tourist money into the plan, which seeks to preserve 250 acres of property in the old ethnic neighborhoods, renovating the shophouses and developing businesses that will attract visitors to the narrow streets of the old quarters.

The developers even hope to recreate Bugis Street, which was the last vestige of this port city’s once-swinging night life. Bugis Street gave way in 1985 to construction of Singapore’s soon-to-be-opened subway system, putting an end to a popular tradition of cold beer, hawkers’ food and a post-midnight parade of transvestites. But tourist-belt sex, a big attraction in Bangkok and Manila, is not part of the plan in Singapore.

Exotic Image Recalled

“We believe in good, clean fun,” the tourist board’s Lee said, reflecting the somewhat straight-laced attitudes of her brother-in-law.

Singapore’s exotic image, embellished in literature by Kipling, Conrad and Maugham, was captured by an earlier writer, Isabella Bird, in an 1879 letter to a sister. Reprinted in a recent anthology, it says, in part:

“It is only the European part of Singapore which is dull and sleepy looking. No life and movement congregate around the shops. The merchants, hidden away behind jalousies in their offices, or dashing down the streets in covered buggies, make but a poor show. . . . Their wives, growing paler every week, lead half-expiring lives, kept alive by the efforts of ubiquitous ‘punkah wallahs’ (a house servant who, by pulling a cord, operates the punkah, an overhead fabric fan).

“The native streets monopolize the picturesqueness of Singapore with their bizarre crowds. . . . Crowds of buyers and sellers chaffer over their goods, the Chinese shopkeepers asking a little more than they mean to take, and the klings (Indian Tamils) always asking double.”

Another observer of the same period, William Hornaday, described the layout of the city:

“Singapore is certainly the handiest city I ever saw. . . . It is like a big desk, full of drawers and pigeonholes, where everything has its place and can always be found in it. For instance, around the esplanade you find the European hotels--and bad enough they are, too; around Commercial Square, packed closely together, are all the shipping offices, warehouses and shops, and along Boat Quay are all the ship chandlers.

“Nearby, you will find a dozen large Chinese medicine shops, a dozen cloth shops, a tailor’s and carpenters, others for the sale of fruit, vegetables, grain, notions and so on. . . . All the washerwomen congregate on a five-acre lawn called Dhobi Green. . . . There you will see the white shirts, trousers and pajamas of His Excellency, perhaps, hanging in ignominious proximity to and on a level with yours. . . . Owing to this peculiar grouping of the different trades, one can do more business in less time in Singapore than in any other town in the world.”

Changing Scene

What is the image of Singapore today?

Fatimah Gous, the mother of two children and head of a public relations firm: “I tell the tourism people to promote the safety. This is a very safe city. You can walk almost anywhere at any time and not worry about crime.”

Susan Sim, a tourist board officer: “It’s multiracial (three-quarters Chinese, with Indian, Malay and European minorities) and multicultural; a city of contrasts, the new and the old.”

But Sim and other Singaporeans tend to stress the new. “We are fashionable,” she said, and this is an accurate description of the Singapore that most tourists see and most Singaporeans favor. Fine hotels, good restaurants, European and American clothes await the visitor. And for those who take the time, it is true, as residents say, that the old Singapore can be found if the seeker knows where to look.

But in Singapore, which rushed headlong into the modern world as quickly as any nation in the post-World War II period, there appears to be no popular call to freeze development or to step back.

“We want to develop things that will attract our own citizens,” Pamelia Lee said. “If they enjoy something, the tourists will as well.”

Trying to Save Heritage

Cheok Yen Aik, a top official of the Urban Redevelopment Authority, casts the planned preservation of ethnic neighborhoods in domestic terms. “We are trying to save our heritage,” he insisted. “We’re not just doing this for the tourists.”

His agency swung the wrecker’s ball in the 1960s, destroying the dilapidated housing whose remnants are now marked for preservation.

“These were slums, overcrowded,” Cheok said. “In 1960, a quarter of the population lived on 1% of the land.”

In the 1970s, the agency cleared the way for the office buildings and infrastructure required by a modern economy.

“The priorities here have always been in accordance with the economy,” Cheok said. “Then, about two years ago, we had achieved what we wanted: a very functional city.”

Along the way, there had been some public grumbling about destruction, and some elderly residents of the old neighborhoods were reluctant to begin new lives in the public housing apartment blocks, no matter how bad things were on their streets. But the redevelopment agency, supported by a no-questions-asked land acquisition act, had moved ahead.

Now it has been given the task of preservation. The private owners of the remaining shophouses in Chinatown and Little India, on Arab Street and at Boat Quay and other areas along the river, are being asked to work with the agency to develop their properties--at their own expense--for commercial and tourist potential. The redevelopment agency will provide the supportive development, roads and other infrastructure.

How can shop house owners afford to go into development schemes?

Shops Jammed With Goods

“Don’t underestimate their financial muscle,” Cheok said, smiling.

The best potential, he said, would be for the owners of adjoining shophouses to join together for development, gutting the interiors of two or three of the narrow buildings to maximize the usable interior space and still maintain the facade. But part of the charm of shopping in the old districts now is pushing into a store jammed with goods, pressing past other customers and dodging items hanging from the ceiling. The character is in the congestion.

Some people question whether the projects will preserve the life of the old neighborhoods or whether they will become false fronts, like the pseudo-fishing ports and mining towns found in the United States.

But Singapore has the advantage of its communities still being ethnically and culturally whole--Chinese in one area, Indians in another--just as Thomas Stamford Raffles laid it out when he designed the city in 1828. In the high-rise housing outside the city center, the government has deliberately created an ethnic mix, but in the older areas the ethnic communities’ homogeneity has remained, apparently by choice.

Singapore has other tourism problems. In the heyday of the hotels, high room rates helped to build an image that the city was an expensive stop on the tourist trail. But now and for the next few years, first-class hotel rooms will be available for under $50 a night, and other costs are competitive with prices in Bangkok and Hong Kong, though clean and tidy Singapore cannot match the street life of those two cities--and, under Prime Minister Lee, it probably will not try.

The glut of malls has given the city an image of a shoppers’ paradise--and its negative aspect, that shopping is all that Singapore offers. The tourist board is trying to broaden the possibilities. The preservation program will be a key part of it.

Pamelia Lee argues that Singapore’s image, largely a product of its crossroads history and her brother-in-law’s drive for development, is something she can sell.

“I couldn’t have done better myself,” she said.