Singapore Unlikely Power Chapter 7 Part 2 - Containers Ships and a New City
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.
The Steel Box That Changed Everything
Perry spends a big chunk of this section on containerization, and honestly it deserves the space. Before the standard shipping container, moving goods by sea was painfully slow. A ship could sit in port for over a week getting unloaded and reloaded. Workers carried stuff piece by piece. Scotch whiskey exporters routinely expected to lose one bottle out of every ten to “pilferage.” Sometimes from crates that were “accidentally” dropped. You get the picture.
Then along came Malcom McLean, a high school graduate from North Carolina who ran a gas station. He once received a shipment of car batteries from Atlanta and discovered the freight cost more than the batteries themselves. So he decided he was in the wrong business and bought a used truck.
Here’s the thing about McLean. He wasn’t a ship guy at all. He was a trucker. But in 1937, waiting at a dock in Hoboken to deliver cotton bales, he watched stevedores loading cargo one crate at a time and thought: why not just lift my entire trailer onto the ship? It took him nearly twenty years to act on that idea. In 1955 he jumped from trucking to shipping. People thought he was nuts. One of his closest associates said McLean didn’t even think about the risk he was taking.
On April 26, 1956, McLean’s converted World War II oil tanker sailed out of Newark with fifty-eight steel boxes of uniform size sitting on a reinforced deck. Nobody knew if they’d get swept overboard. They didn’t. And a new industry was born.
Perry also introduces us to Daniel Ludwig, the man behind supertankers and bulk carriers. Ludwig was reportedly the richest man in the world at one point, known for barely suppressed rage and legendary cheapness. He once reprimanded an employee for including a paperclip in a letter. “We do not pay to send ironmongery by airmail!” He found a former Japanese Navy shipyard at Kure, near Hiroshima, where the massive battleship Yamato had been built in secret. He leased it cheaply, hired the talented Japanese workers who were happy to have jobs again, and started turning out bigger and bigger ships using American assembly-line techniques.
Singapore Bets Early on Containers
So here’s what happened. While British shipbuilders were still resisting diesel engines and welded hulls, Singapore saw the container revolution coming and moved fast. Less than a year after independence, in July 1966, the government launched a thorough study of container shipping technology. By 1972 Singapore had opened its first container berths before any shipping company had even committed to the container trade between Europe and Pacific Asia. By 1983, half of all arriving cargo came in boxes. By 1990, Singapore was handling more containers than any port in the world.
Perry quotes one source saying “No government anywhere was more aggressive in preparing for the container age than Singapore.” That aggressiveness cemented its reputation as “an island of efficiency.”
But here’s the problem that comes with all this efficiency. Ports became dehumanized. Cranes and computers replaced gangs of dockworkers. The solitary worker replaced the team. Ships that once spent days in port now spend hours. A captain of a huge container ship told a journalist who said he’d always wanted to be a seaman: “Me too, and I had my wish and I am sorry. The sea is now boring and it is dangerous. The worst of both worlds.”
Perry captures something genuinely sad about this progress. Sailors can’t “go to sea and see the world” anymore. Waterfronts fenced themselves off from the cities they used to be part of. One Singaporean says of the port today: “We know that it’s there but we don’t think about it.”
The British Leave and Sell Their Base for a Dollar
In 1967, Britain announced it was pulling out of the massive Sembawang naval base. The British military was Singapore’s largest employer, providing seventy thousand jobs directly or indirectly, generating a quarter of the GDP. This was a hard blow, even if it shouldn’t have been a surprise after Suez.
The British initially planned to leave by 1975. Budget problems pushed that up to 1971. By way of apology, they sold Sembawang to the Singaporean government for one dollar. Singapore got a naval dockyard, a giant dry dock, floating docks, cranes, acres of workshops, and a skilled workforce of three thousand. A Singaporean involved in the takeover said the British “took back only those things that we couldn’t use. Other than that, they left behind practically everything! And in good working order.”
The transition wasn’t smooth though. The government hired British firm Swan Hunter to manage the commercial conversion. Naval workers had different habits. Warships got an extra coat of paint for added gloss, every piece of brasswork polished, time no consideration. Commercial shipping? One coat of paint is fine, just get it done fast and cheap.
Then came Lim Cheng Pah, an ex-cop with zero maritime experience, as personnel director. His coworkers called him “The Little Terror.” He found a sprawling yard full of rubbish and flies, two hundred men calling in sick every day, theft everywhere. As an ex-cop, he knew what to do. “Walk the beat,” he said. He banned long hair and installed a barbershop on the premises. His philosophy was simple: “Production is discipline.”
In 1978, Sembawang dropped Swan Hunter, who soon went bankrupt. The company was finally free to put locals in management positions. Board Chairman Hsu Tsi Kwang summed up the strategy: “Don’t try to build ordinary ships. You will never be able to compete with the Japanese and the Koreans. But you find a niche, build specialized ships.” That niche thinking would define Singapore’s entire economic approach.
Neptune-Orient Lines and a Future Prime Minister
The government also decided Singapore needed its own shipping line. In December 1968 they established Neptune-Orient Lines (NOL). And that’s why it matters: they named it after the Roman god of the seas but made sure to identify it as Asian. A small detail, but telling.
One of the people who ran NOL early on was Goh Chok Tong, who would later become Prime Minister from 1990 to 2004. He had zero shipping experience. When he learned about his new job, he went straight to a bookstore and bought every book on shipping he could find. He later said “NOL gave me a world view” essential to his success as PM. In 1997, NOL acquired American President Lines and actually dropped its own brand for the APL name, exploiting the prestige of a company that had been around for over a century.
A New City Rises from a Dead River
The final section covers Singapore’s physical transformation. In the 1970s, the government launched an ambitious rebuilding program: housing, schools, expressways, rapid transit.
The Singapore River had become an ecological disaster. A dead body of water, a cesspool notorious for its stench. In 1977, Lee Kuan Yew announced a bold ten-year project to turn it from “a liability to an asset.” Robertson Quay lost its rice mills, sawmills, and boatyards, replaced by hotels, restaurants, and outdoor cafes. New stone seawalls, tree-lined promenades, and glass towers went up.
Perry notes the tension that came with all this building. Some old shophouses were preserved, but critics said they were “mere shells with no soul.” A local writer countered: “Who cares? The buildings are saved and that is what matters in the end.” It’s a debate that still hasn’t been settled. Rapid modernization always destroys something valuable along with the things nobody will miss.
By the mid-1980s, despite a global recession, Singapore had climbed the value chain impressively. David Marshall, the fiery first Chief Minister from earlier chapters, put it this way: the government “not only filled our rice bowl, they’ve given us jade cups and jade chopsticks to eat with.”
And the public? They measured success by the five C’s: Career, Condominium, Credit Card, Car, and (golf) Club. The basic needs were covered. Now people wanted quality of life. For a country that didn’t even want to exist twenty years earlier, that’s a pretty remarkable place to be.
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