I have written this book in the hope that the history of Singapore’s Tanjong Pagar and Anson port and portside, an important area which now no longer exists, is not forgotten forever,
In fact, the founder of modern Singapore, Thomas Stamford Raffles, who arrived on its southern coast in 1819, would never have imagined that there would be a wholesale transformation of the area in only 200 years.
Had he arrived again in some kind of time warp in 2017, he would not have recognised the place. Other than the shock of seeing modern ships zoom by his sailing vessels, he would not see the original coastline of hillocks and forest. There would be no little settlements with people going about their daily lives, moving along the coast in small boats. And fishing from them.
The beaches would have been replaced by concrete wharves. He would, of course, find it strange that one large part of the wharves would be empty. With tall metallic structures on one side that stood still and silent. As he looked into the area behind the wharves, he would have noticed that it was huge and be puzzled that no one was there.
While he would probably have known in the 1820s that work began to reclaim the coastline for a port only three years after his arrival, he would not have imagined the huge scale of work that would take place on the port over the rest of the 19th century and into the 20th century, tapering off only in the early 21st century.
A port would be built here. Thousands of people from Malaya, Indonesia, China and India would move here. Many would work in the port and many others would set up businesses portside. The whole area would grow because the port, which had been conventional, like other ports all over the world, would play an important part in the economic growth of the country.
In conventional ports, cargo would be in pallets, boxes, sacks or nets. These would be loaded by the ship’s own derricks or cranes on shore, including crane lorries with extended booms.
However, there would be unstoppable change from the mid-1960s. Ports began to overhaul their operations to work with the trend towards using large containers. The Singapore port was fast in making this change. There was more reclamation, especially at the East Lagoon, which was at the edge of the port facing the Shenton Way business district. The first container wharves opened there in 1972.
As container operations increased, even making the Singapore port the busiest in the world, they required more space. The authorities decided to expand into the portside, demolishing whole streets of prewar buildings and moving out tens of thousands of people.
Then there was a change in the thinking. It was decided that the port would be relocated. All the container operations would move along the southwest coast to Pasir Panjang, with the final destination being the Tuas Megaport.
The move would result in the container wharves at the East Lagoon, which was by then called the Tanjong Pagar Terminal, and the portside that had been cleared in the past for the increasing container operations, becoming vacant by 2017.
This is the empty space Raffles would have seen had he arrived in Singapore in some kind of time warp. Everything that existed from 1819, at the time of his actual arrival, till 2017, now no longer existed.
A Brief History of Singapore’s Tanjong Pagar and Anson Portside is available at $30 from the Epigram Bookshop. The writer will also be making an e-book available from next week (Aug 1).