Singapore Unlikely Power Chapter 3 - Queen of the Further East

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.

A City of Immigrants

Here’s the thing about early Singapore. It was a city built almost entirely by people who came from somewhere else. Think of it like New York, but in Southeast Asia. Perry actually makes that comparison directly.

The British ran the place, sure. But they were always a tiny minority. Government officials, military guys, merchants, and a few beachcombers who never left. The real engine of growth was immigration, and most of those immigrants were Chinese.

The Malays were there first, obviously. But they were a diverse group themselves, coming from the peninsula and from places as far as the Bugis islands across the archipelago. Perry points out something uncomfortable that still echoes today. Malays tended to resist modernization, preferring village life over city life, farms over factories. He tells this story about a Malay girl who did poorly on a math test, and her teacher said “you people don’t do well in math.” The girl proved her wrong, but that kind of thinking ran deep, even among top government officials.

Indians came too. Tamil laborers did the brutal work of clearing jungle and draining swamps. Chettiars became moneylenders. Northern Indians like Gujerati sailors added to the mix. Arabs became influential merchants and ended up owning about half of Singapore’s land by the turn of the nineteenth century. Armenians established the famous Raffles Hotel. But all these groups were dwarfed by the Chinese.

Why the Chinese Came

This is where Perry gets really interesting. China in the early 1800s was falling apart. The last dynasty was crumbling. Chaos was spreading. And along the southern coast, in Guangdong and Fujian provinces, life was already tough. Poor soil, heavy rain, mountains cutting off the coast from the interior. People there had always looked to the sea for survival.

So when word got out that there was this new British trading post down in Southeast Asia where you could actually make a living, people started showing up. And unlike the US or Canada, where Chinese people faced serious hostility, Singapore mostly welcomed them.

Perry describes how these immigrants weren’t one single group at all. Hokkien, Teochew, Hakka, Cantonese, Hainanese. Each community had its own part of the city. They spoke different dialects and couldn’t always understand each other. Secret societies formed along these lines, and they sometimes fought in the streets. The British found it all a “confounded nuisance” and mostly just wanted everyone to keep the peace.

But here’s what made the Chinese so successful in Singapore. They operated on three principles: family, personal trust, and what Perry calls a “bamboo network” of connections. Under pressure it might bend but it would not break. They brought their work ethic, their savings habits, and their emphasis on education. And since government careers were closed to them in colonial Singapore, the best and brightest went into business.

Then there were the Peranakan, or Baba and Nonya. These were Chinese who had been in the Straits region for generations, intermarrying with Malays, creating this fascinating hybrid culture. They spoke Malay, ate a blend of Chinese and Malay food, and crucially, many of them spoke English. That made them incredibly useful as go-betweens in a city where the British didn’t bother learning local languages.

Opium: The Government’s Dirty Revenue Stream

So how did this free port with no customs duties pay its bills? Here’s where it gets dark.

The colonial government made its money from vice. Alcohol monopolies, gambling (on and off), and above all, opium. Perry doesn’t sugarcoat this. He straight up calls early Singapore “an early version of a narco-state.” Even into the 1930s, nearly a third of government revenue came from opium.

The raw opium came from India, where poor farmers in Bengal grew poppies under British East India Company control. Chinese dealers in Singapore prepared and sold it, mostly to the poorest Chinese laborers. Perry calls them “piglets.” These were guys who pulled rickshaws, hauled coal on the docks, and grew pepper and gambier. They lived in awful, overcrowded housing, unmarried, without family. They smoked opium to escape their misery, and many became addicts.

Perry tries to put this in historical context. Opium was widely used in Britain too. You could buy it at pharmacies, groceries, even bookstores. “Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup” kept babies quiet with it. A famous Canadian physician called it “God’s own medicine” as late as the 1890s. But that context doesn’t make the Singapore situation less grim. The people at the bottom suffered while the government and dealers profited.

Pirates and Gunboats

The chapter has this great section on piracy that reads like an adventure novel. Pirates disguised themselves as passengers on ships, then attacked mid-voyage. They wore their hair long and loose to look scarier. Their oar-powered longboats could catch sailing ships when the wind died.

Perry tells one incredible story about the ship Viscount Melbourne, wrecked off Kalimantan in 1841. The survivors, including a mother and baby, took to small boats trying to sail six hundred miles back to Singapore. Pirates caught up with them, stripped them of everything, even clothing and a water keg (they wanted the wooden container, not the water). But the pirate chief then shook hands with the captain and let them go. They made it back to Singapore in eight days.

What ended piracy wasn’t diplomacy. It was technology. Steam-powered iron gunboats like the HMS Nemesis changed everything. This ship could go places sailing vessels couldn’t, chase pirates in shallow waters, and carry serious firepower. The pirates had neither steam nor iron. And that’s Perry’s bigger point about this era: the Industrial Revolution created an enormous gap between those who had machines and those who didn’t.

The Port That Never Stopped Growing

By mid-century, Singapore’s harbor was packed. The river that had been the heart of shipping became too small and congested. The Tanjong Pagar dock company was established in 1860, and New Harbor (later renamed Keppel Harbor) was developed for the bigger steamships.

Coal became king. It was what oil would be in the twentieth century. Workers hauled it in baskets suspended from shoulder poles, ten hours a day, Sundays included. A small staff of well-paid Europeans managed operations while entirely Asian labor did the actual work.

And then came two things that sealed Singapore’s importance. The telegraph cable arrived in 1871, connecting Singapore to a global British communications network. And coal-hungry steamships needed refueling stations at regular intervals across the world’s sea routes. Singapore, sitting right between India and China, was perfectly positioned.

Perry ends this chapter by setting up the Suez Canal’s impact. Steam ships could now go places wind-powered ones couldn’t, including through the Red Sea with its unfavorable winds. But to really connect the Mediterranean to Asia, you needed a canal. And that, as Perry hints, would carry immense importance for Singapore.

This chapter is really about the formula that made Singapore work: British law and order plus Chinese entrepreneurship plus a location that the technology of the age made increasingly valuable. It wasn’t planned. It wasn’t inevitable. But it worked, messy and morally complicated as it was.

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