The facades

of the remaining Victorian shop-houses recall Covent Garden on some impossibly bright London day. I took several solitary, jet-lagged walks at dawn, when a
city's ghosts tend to be most visible, but there was very little to be seen of previous realities: Joss stick smouldering in an old brass holder on the white-painted column of a shop-house; a mirror positioned above the door of a supplier of electrical goods, set to snare and deflect the evil that travels in a straight line; a rusty trishaw, chained to a freshly painted iron railing. The physical past, here, has almost ntirely vanished. In 1811, when Temenggong, a local chief, arrived to resettle Singapura,
the Lion City, with a hundred Malays, the jungle had long since reclaimed
the ruins of a 14th-century city once warred over by Java, Siam, and the
Chinese.