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Branding the Singapore River: Raffles and Restaurants

  • Writer: Joyce Lee
    Joyce Lee
  • Sep 24, 2023
  • 4 min read

Updated: Aug 23, 2024

Selling the past


During the 2020 BLM protests, statues of colonial figures, from 17th-century slave trader Edward Colston to Christopher Columbus, were targeted for removal and defacement. In Singapore, a white polymarble statue of Sir Stanford Raffles came under unusual scrutiny. Posing regally on the banks of the Singapore River, the white Raffles is an instantly recognisable icon, an unabashed commemoration of the port city's British past. Seemingly at odds with postcolonial sensibilities, the East India Company official is vaunted as a founder by Singapore's history textbooks and derided as a colonialist by its tweeters.



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Example of post calling for Raffles statue removal (Devarajan, 2020)


The white statue so targeted began its iconic life as a copy of a bronze piece commissioned for Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. Originally placed in the Padang, the bronze Raffles was moved to Empress Place in 1919 for Singapore's Centenary. During the Japanese Occupation, it was removed into the Raffles Museum. There, it languished for three miserable years. In 1946, Raffles emerged from hiding, being reinstalled, with the return of British rule, in Empress Place, outside Victoria Memorial Hall (Lee, 2020).



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The original bronze statue of Raffles outside Victoria Memorial Hall

British rule would last another seventeen years, followed by two tumultuous years of union with Malaya. Post-independence, Lee Kuan Yew’s economic advisor, Albert Winsemius, encouraged him to keep the bronze statue to signal to the West that Singapore still welcomes them (and their capital). In the 1960s, foreign investors were wary of the Communist wave sweeping Asia, engulfing China, menacing Malaya, and threatening to take all of Vietnam. Keeping Raffles in his place branded Singapore as a safe oasis of capitalism, friendly to westerners and commerce (Goh, 2023).


Adopted as a strange national symbol, Raffles received a mythology and a physical upgrade. In 1972, a white polymarble copy of the bronze Raffles was erected at a site along the Singapore River, allegedly the place he first stepped foot on the island (Tan, n.d.). The white statue bears the inscription:


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Inscription under white Raffles statue

The narrative attested to therein is heavily contested. Some point to the 14th-century Kingdom of Singapura as evidence of an indigenous Malay ‘metropolis’ before the British. Others underline the island’s role as a trading port between the 13th and 16th centuries.


Raffles' status as a founder is similarly a site of memory politics. Local artist Jimmy Ong has made parodies of the Raffles Statue, lampooning the colonial officer's perceived misdeeds and using them to highlight present-day neocolonialism in the garment industry. In "Seamstresses", Ong destroys cotton effigies of Raffles to punish him for his crimes of exploitation.


The artist's anger is not without basis. The Raffles statues (bronze and polymarble) represent a sanitised history that privileges the narrative of economic success, glossing over realities of past and ongoing injustice.


Myths of a fishing village, third world to first, mirror the dominant themes of Atlanta Magazine analysed in Greenberg’s paper, "Branding Cities: A Social History of the Urban Lifestyle Magazine". Like Singapore, Atlanta was a developing city in the 1970s hungry for foreign investment. To shed its backwater image, the southern metropolis emphasised openness to the world and technical advancements.


Greenberg (2020) discusses how racial inequity is erased in the branding of urban lifestyle publications like Atlanta Magazine. She writes:


“The urban lifestyle represented by the magazines had less to do with the human face of the city at all, and took the form of an imaginary conflict-free landscape of the city as pure commodity.”


Likewise, the official Singapore is an imaginary city, free from conflict and ready for easy consumption. Raffles is her icon, the clean (is it still clean?) river her pride.


The Singapore River that Raffles once sailed upon has been scrubbed of old history and painted over with a new face. Since the early 2000s, residential blocks along the waterfront have been demolished, displacing residents who used to stay there. In their place, sprang upmarket restaurants and hip nightclubs from Quay to Quay, accompanied by condominiums and art venues. These developments were all part of Singapore’s efforts to become a ‘world-class’ city (Chang & Huang, 2011). Inevitably, their cost excludes people of lesser means, erecting barriers to a public space. This ties into Sharon Zukin (1998)’s argument that areas gentrified to attract the ‘right crowd’ have:


“Fostered a new urban culture based on acquisition and consumption as the means of achieving happiness”


The commercial spaces along the waterfront serve both locals and foreigners, providing locals with means a chance to experience the good life. Though some criticise the river's gentrification, venues along Clarke Quay and Boat Quay have become part of Singapore's consumption culture. On Singapore's Tourism site, the city's top past times are listed as 'feasting and shopping'. Really? Really.


Paradoxically, shallow messages made for visitors may not appeal to them. In a study which conducted interviews with tourists along Singapore’s waterfront, researchers found expressions of disappointment among tourists with the area's 'soulless' character (Chang & Huang, 2011). Tourists often want distinctive experiences which are missing in homogenised areas like the Singapore River’s three quays. Instead of local shops and history, they get foreign cuisines, avant-garde architecture, and a dearth of placards shedding light on the river’s past. One interviewee said, somewhat scathingly, “I didn’t see Singapore’s history at all.”


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