Taking the trip around the Singapore River is an experience I don’t get quite often, especially after my primary school days (when we used to have field trips to town). Hence it was nice to be walking around the area again. We all felt like tourists as we sauntered along the river bank, stopping every now and then to take a wefie and gawking and commenting on every small little thing we see. Even though the landscape of the place hasn’t changed much since the last time I’d visited, going on the trail with some knowledge of what Singapore was like 200 years ago made the experience slightly different. To think that the road I was walking on could have been the exact road a coolie took every day, or even the exact spot Raffles landed two centuries ago made the trip a little more meaningful.
However, I did not feel that the trip has changed my perception of Singapore’s history because not many of the landmarks that we stopped at had signs that explained what the building or the spot was about (save for a couple) and we tapped on a lot of our own contextual knowledge to figure out how the landmark fitted into the Singapore narrative. For instance, one of the spots we had to visit was the Fullerton Boat House. It took us a long time to find the place, and when we did we could not find any accompanying signboards that explained what the Boat House was. Thus at times it just felt like we were aimlessly looking for the next destination and the trail, while useful for a tourist to get to know the Singapore River area, did not contribute much to provide us with further insights of Singapore’s history.
I thought the most interesting part of the trip was when we stopped at the Raffles Landing site to read the description below the statue of Raffles. Having just come out of a Singapore History lecture about the controversy of who the founder of Singapore really is, the description just seemed like a selection of certain facts because it so overwhelmingly pointed to Raffles as the founder, completely ignoring Farquhar and Crawfurd. While we understood that this was to align with the main Singapore narrative, it is interesting to see it so obviously displayed in the public and I guess this is one way the main narrative of Singapore’s history has been embedded into our public consciousness.
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