This week: on the century of Lee Kuan Yew’s birth, discover how wartime trauma helped form modern Singapore. This month’s cover story is now free to read for the next seven days. Also: the invention that transformed art, the shadow of Pinochet, and Eleanor Parker asks: ‘Lore, what is it good for?’
On the north bank of the Singapore River is an eight-foot-tall statue of a man striking a stately pose, arms folded, gazing into the horizon. Stamford Raffles stands – according to the plaque attached to the plinth – on the ‘historic site’ where he first landed as an agent of the British East India Company on 28 January 1819 and, thereafter, ‘with genius and perception changed the destiny of Singapore from an obscure fishing village to a great seaport and modern metropolis’. Raffles – who is officially recognised as the ‘founder’ of modern Singapore – had a strong conviction that the tiny trading outpost he founded at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula would fulfil a destiny larger than its physical size. He was right. But he was not a nation-builder.
