Singapore
Singapore is an island country at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, just north of the equator. It is a city and a country at once, made of one main island and about 60 small ones. Its flag is red and white, with a crescent moon and five stars.
“I'd take off from the old racecourse, the way the first plane did.”
- On 16 March 1911 the Belgian pilot Joseph Christiaens made Singapore's first aeroplane flight, from the old racecourse at Farrer Park.
- Singapore has grown bigger since the 1960s, by filling in parts of the sea with sand and soil.
The land
Singapore lies across the narrow Strait of Johor from Malaysia. It is small: about 735 square km of land in 2024. Jurong Island, in the south-west, was made by joining several small islands into one. The work was finished in 2009, and the island now holds the country's chemical plants. The highest natural point is Bukit Timah Hill, at 163.63 metres.
Getting around
Two road links cross the strait to Malaysia: the Causeway, opened in 1924, and the Second Link at Tuas, opened on 2 January 1998. The first stretch of the MRT, Singapore's metro, opened on 7 November 1987. In 1975 Singapore began charging drivers to enter the city centre at busy times, the first scheme of its kind in the world. Since 1998 the charge has been collected electronically.
Food
Singapore's hawker centres began as a way to take food sellers off the streets. From 1971 to early 1986, some 18,000 street hawkers moved into more than 110 new hawker centres. In 2016 the first Michelin guide to Singapore gave a star to a hawker stall in Chinatown Complex Food Centre, where a plate of soya sauce chicken rice cost S$2.
A garden city
On 16 June 1963 Lee Kuan Yew planted a mempat tree at Farrer Circus to start the country's first tree-planting campaign. In 1967 he set out a vision of Singapore as a "Garden City", green and clean.
