Anytime a country's most famous landmark is a hotel, you can rightfully assume a few things. The country in question is a comfortable place. Historical preservation and unique architecture are probably not high on that country's agenda.
And it's probably a damn nice hotel.
All of these assumptions are, for the most part, true of Singapore and one of the few remaining bastions of its colonial heritage, the Raffles Hotel. And when my wife and I were in the Lion City recently, we knew our primary destination would be the hotel that’s as much a Singapore icon as nonexistent crime, mouth-watering food, gleaming new office towers and flogged Americans.
The Raffles’ ambiance as an oasis of romance and civility may be manufactured, but its history is as real as the mustaches on the faces of its turbaned-doormen. My college history professor, Dr. John Hubbard (a former U.S. ambassador to India), once said of the Raffles Hotel, "Spend enough time in the bar at the Raffles, and everyone you ever knew will come walking through the door." That quote says a lot, both about the hotel itself and the echelon of crowd Dr. John rolled with.
The Raffles is one of the most famous hotels in the world, thanks in part to the invention of the Singapore Sling in the hotel's Long Bar. And I don't mean the cinematic classic staring Playmate Shannon Tweed; I'm talking about the tall fruity cocktail. Bartender Ngiam Tong Boon created the concoction sometime around the turn of the century, and who would have known that his drink would one day be a preferred inebriation vehicle for scantily clad sorority girls across America. That is a testament to Boon's genius.
Legend has it that the last tiger in Singapore was shot and killed under the bar's pool table. But animal rights activists needn't shed a tear for the now-extinct Singapore tiger: it lives on in stuffed toy form at the hotel gift shop. After all, true legends never die, they endure as overpriced plush memorabilia (just ask Elvis). Extermination and souvenirdom might sound like a hollow consolation prize for the tiger, but let's face it, when gorillas are extinct a decade from now they'll be lucky to get that.
The tigers are long gone, and the only wildlife inside the Long Bar today are the pigeons that flit around the rafters overhead, and pink sunburned tourists. Kicking back in the wood-paneled veranda, ceiling fans turning lazily overhead, you can't help but feel just like the literary giants - Kipling, Greene, Maugham, Waugh, Conrad - who have passed through these hallowed halls. Well, minus the raging drinking problem. And the omnipresent moral uncertainty at European hegemony over the world. And bowels ravaged by yellow fever.
The hotel's unwavering aristocratic mettle was tested during World War II, as the Japanese closed in on the island and the hotel. As Singapore surrendered to the Axis powers, British nationals gathered in the hotel ballroom to sing "There Will Always Be An England." At the time they might have added a second verse, "We Might Speak Japanese in England From Now On, And Who The Hell Knows How Chips Will Taste With Sushi, But An England There Always Will Be."
While the island was under Japanese occupation, the hotel was used as a transit camp for POWs. Not to marginalize the suffering those POWs endured, but that means their prison camp was approximately five thousand times nicer than my college dorm. Have freed POWs ever begged to stay captive? If it ever happened, odds are it happened at the Raffles.
Unfortunately, today's travelers care less about famous writers and wartime dirges than they do about high-speed internet and room service. So after being designated a National Monument in 1988, the hotel closed down for refurbishment. Usually in Singapore, ‘closing down for refurbishment’ is code for ‘being razed to the ground and replaced by an antiseptic 50-story skyscraper.’ But in this case the icon on Bras Basah Road would return, to the delight of romantics and business travelers on exorbitant expense accounts everywhere.
When it reopened to great fanfare in 1991, it had all the blandness and soft sheets you'd expect from a hotel of its luxurious caliber and extravagant price range. But try as they may have, they couldn't scrub the hotel's incredible history and incomparable character from its walls.
Through it all, the Raffles Hotel remains not only one of the world's greatest hotels, but also a time capsule preserving an era of adventure and romance (and maybe a little bit of prejudice thrown in). There are few other places with such an interesting list of ingredients. It's turbulent Southeast Asian history, dripping with humidity and exoticism, with some colonial-era service and pristinely manufactured modern comfort thrown in for good measure. In other words: Burma Road meets Disneyland.
Just don't leave without a stuffed tiger.
