And just like that, we’re done. Over the past two weeks, we’ve walked through the entire story of Singapore - from ancient sea traders to a modern global powerhouse. Here are my final thoughts on John Curtis Perry’s “Singapore: Unlikely Power.”
Perry’s final chapter is the kind that makes you sit back and think. After eight chapters tracing Singapore from ancient Temasek through colonial port to modern powerhouse, he steps back and asks: so what does all this mean for the future? Can this tiny island actually become the hinge that connects the world’s great civilizations?
The second half of Chapter VIII gets into territory that makes Singapore genuinely fascinating and genuinely uncomfortable at the same time. Perry covers the “Asian values” debate, the tight grip the government keeps on politics and media, and then the wild card nobody planned for: the internet.
Chapter VIII is called “Coming to the Present,” and it marks a shift in Perry’s book. We’re past the colonial era, past independence, past Lee Kuan Yew’s early nation-building. Now we’re looking at modern Singapore figuring out how to survive when the old playbook isn’t enough anymore.
The second half of Chapter VII is where Perry gets into the stuff that actually built modern Singapore. Not the political drama of independence or the merger with Malaysia. The physical, industrial, nuts-and-bolts transformation. Steel boxes on ships. A naval base sold for one dollar. A dead river turned into a waterfront district. This is the chapter where Singapore stops being a story about survival and starts becoming a story about engineering.
On August 9, 1965, Lee Kuan Yew went on TV, cried, and told Singapore it was now a country. Not because they wanted to be. Because Malaysia kicked them out.
When the British marched back into Singapore in 1945, they were not the gentlemen the locals had been raised to expect. A Malay observer described them as “often drunk and disorderly, consorting openly with women of the streets.” The image of the English gentleman was shattered. And honestly, so was pretty much everything else.
Churchill called December 10, 1941, “the worst day of the war.” Not because of some abstract strategic loss. Because on that day, the Royal Navy lost two of its biggest ships to Japanese aircraft. And with them, any illusion that Britain could defend Singapore.
Chapter V of “Singapore: Unlikely Power” is where things start going very wrong. Perry titled it “Clouds, Thunder, and Storm” and that really nails it. Everything we’ve been reading about in previous chapters, the trade, the empire, the comfy colonial life, it’s all about to get smashed. But nobody in Singapore seems to notice.
The first half of this chapter was all about Suez, steam, and how Singapore found itself at the center of a shrinking world. This second half gets into what actually flowed through that center. Tin. Rubber. People. Some came voluntarily. Many did not.
Chapter IV is where Singapore stops being a scrappy trading outpost and starts becoming a real global port. Three things happened almost at once in the late 1860s and early 1870s: Singapore cut ties with India and reported directly to London, the Suez Canal opened, and the undersea telegraph cable arrived. Perry calls this chapter “Empire at Zenith” and it’s easy to see why. British infrastructure basically supercharged Singapore’s growth.
Chapter III of Perry’s book is where Singapore stops being just a dot on the map and starts becoming a real city. And the story of how that happened is basically about people showing up, working hard, and some seriously questionable government revenue strategies.
Chapter II is called “Wings of Canvas,” which is honestly a great title. It captures this moment in the 1400s and 1500s when Europeans figured out long-distance sailing and suddenly showed up in Asian waters like uninvited guests who never left.
Perry opens this chapter with a line that stuck with me: “An equatorial jungle swamp provides an unpromising spawning ground for a world-class city.”
Perry opens with a memory from his childhood in 1930s New Jersey. A small wooden model boat, a Malayan prau, that he loved carrying around as a kid. His parents had lived in Southeast Asia in the 1920s, working on a rubber plantation. Their house was filled with exotic stuff: a tiger skin on the floor, an elephant-foot wastebasket, brass trays, opium pipes, batik hangings. For a kid growing up in suburban Maplewood during the Great Depression, this was basically having a portal to another world sitting in your living room.
I just finished reading “Singapore: Unlikely Power” by John Curtis Perry, and I have to say - this book blew my mind a little.
This is the twelfth and final post in my series retelling The KGB Plays Chess (ISBN: 978-1-888690-75-0, Russell Enterprises, 2010). Over the past eleven posts we covered every chapter, every author, every story in this book. Now I want to step back, take a breath, and talk about what all of it means.
Most of The KGB Plays Chess (ISBN: 978-1-888690-75-0) is written from the outside looking in. Players telling you what the KGB did to them. Historians connecting the dots. But Chapter 4 is different. It’s a letter. Written by Vladimir Popov, a retired KGB lieutenant colonel, addressed directly to the historian Yuri Felshtinsky. And it reads like nothing else in the book.
Viktor Kortschnoi opens his afterword with a quote from Radishchev’s Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow: “A monster horrid, hideous, huge, hundred-mouthed, and barking!” That line was originally about Russian autocracy in the 1700s. Kortschnoi uses it for the KGB. Same country, different century, same monster.
This is the final part of Boris Gulko’s chapter in The KGB Plays Chess (ISBN: 978-1-888690-75-0). After seven years as a refusenik, Gulko and his wife Anya decided to stop waiting and start fighting. What follows is one of the most intense stretches of the entire book.
Continuing the retelling of The KGB Plays Chess (ISBN: 978-1-888690-75-0). Boris Gulko describes the long, empty years of being stuck in the Soviet Union. Years when time stopped. And the strange games the KGB played off the chessboard.
Continuing the retelling of The KGB Plays Chess (ISBN: 978-1-888690-75-0), Chapter 2 by Boris Gulko. Last time, Gulko described his early career and the decision to apply for emigration. Now comes the hard part. What happens when the Soviet Union says “no” but won’t let you live a normal life either.
Chapter 2 of “The KGB Plays Chess” is where Boris Gulko takes over the storytelling. The previous chapter was the insider account from the KGB officer. This one is deeply personal. Gulko titles it “The Letter Lahmed Problem” and dedicates it to his sister Bella, “my loyal companion on the road to freedom.”
This section of the book shows what the KGB was willing to do when they felt threatened. And the threat was not some foreign spy or military secret. The threat was a chess player and his wife who wanted to leave the country.
Continuing my retelling of The KGB Plays Chess by Boris Gulko, Vladimir Popov, Yuri Felshtinsky, and Viktor Kortschnoi (ISBN: 978-1-888690-75-0). This part covers the KGB’s grip on individual athletes, the hunt for defectors, and how chess became a battlefield for Soviet intelligence.
Chapter 1 of The KGB Plays Chess (ISBN: 978-1-888690-75-0) is written by Vladimir Popov, a former KGB officer, and Yuri Felshtinsky, a historian. And it starts with a bang. No slow warm-up. Just a blunt description of how the Soviet secret police turned sports into a branch of intelligence operations.
The foreword of The KGB Plays Chess (ISBN: 978-1-888690-75-0) is written by Boris Gulko. He’s one of the very few people who held both the USSR and US chess championships. And he spent seven years as a “refusenik,” trapped in the Soviet Union, fighting the KGB just for the right to leave. So when he writes about chess and Soviet power, he knows exactly what he’s talking about.
I just finished reading one of the wildest books about chess I have ever come across. It is called “The KGB Plays Chess: The Soviet Secret Police and the Fight for the World Chess Crown” (ISBN: 978-1-888690-75-0, Russell Enterprises, 2010). And I want to walk you through it.