Fort Canning Hill: Singapore Before Singapore

1. National Museum of Singapore

The oldest museum in the country, at the foot of the oldest hill.

Start at the bottom of the hill, in front of a domed neoclassical building that opened in 1887 as the Raffles Library and Museum. It is the oldest museum in Singapore and it has spent its life changing what it is about — natural history and ethnography under the colonial government, then a national museum after independence, with the collection reorganised each time the country's account of itself changed. The rotunda under the dome is worth walking into even if you go no further. It sits here for a reason. This hill was the centre of the settlement long before there was a waterfront to build on, and the museum at its foot has always been where the story was told. You are about to walk up through the versions of that story, from the most recent at the bottom to the oldest at the top.

The glass rotunda and the ground-floor concourse are free to walk through. If you are short of time, skip the galleries and take the stairs behind the building straight up the hill.

2. The Battlebox

Nine metres down, the room where the decision to surrender was taken.

Under your feet is a bunker of about thirty rooms, built in the late 1930s as the underground command centre for the British defence of Malaya and Singapore. On 15 February 1942, after a week of fighting on the island and with the reservoirs about to fall, Lieutenant-General Arthur Percival met his commanders down there and decided to surrender. Around eighty thousand Allied troops went into captivity — the largest surrender in British military history. Churchill called it the worst disaster. The bunker was sealed and largely forgotten for decades before being rediscovered and opened as a museum. Above ground there is almost nothing to see, which is the point: the whole apparatus of the defence of Singapore was invisible, nine metres under a public park.

The interior is guided-tour only and usually needs booking ahead; the entrance and its story board are open to anyone walking past. Even without going in, standing here and knowing what is below changes the park.

3. Fort Canning Gate

Almost the only thing left of the fort that gave the hill its name.

A gothic brick gateway standing on its own, with a lawn where a fort used to be. Fort Canning was built in 1861 to defend the settlement, and it was named after Viscount Canning, the Governor-General of India. It was obsolete almost immediately — its guns could not reach far enough to protect the harbour, and its real function turned out to be a place to fire a time gun and fly signal flags. Most of the fort was demolished in the early twentieth century. The gate survived, along with a stretch of wall, and it is the clearest surviving piece of the layer of this hill that was purely military. Walk through it: the change in light from the open lawn into the shaded path on the other side is the reason photographers come here.

4. Keramat Iskandar Shah

A shrine said to hold the last king of Singapura — still tended, still visited.

This is the oldest layer of the hill and the reason it was called Bukit Larangan, the Forbidden Hill. Before the British arrived, Malay tradition held that this hill was the seat and the burial ground of the rulers of Singapura, the fourteenth-century settlement here, and it was avoided out of respect. The keramat — a venerated grave — is said to be that of Iskandar Shah, the last of those kings. Whether the grave is his is not settled; what is certain is that people have treated this spot as sacred for a very long time and still do. Incense is burned here and offerings are left. Archaeology has supported the older part of the story. Excavations on this hill have turned up fourteenth-century Chinese ceramics, glass and gold ornaments in quantity — evidence of a substantial trading settlement here five centuries before 1819.

It is a place of worship for some visitors, not a ruin. Keep your voice down, do not step onto the grave platform, and ask before photographing anyone praying.

5. Fort Canning Spice Garden

A recreation of the experimental garden Raffles planted here in 1822.

Terraced beds of nutmeg, clove, pepper, cinnamon and cocoa, laid out to recall the botanical experiment that occupied this slope in the 1820s. Raffles established an experimental garden on Fort Canning in 1822 to test whether spice crops could be grown commercially in Singapore. It was a strategic question as much as an agricultural one: the spice trade was the reason European powers were in this part of the world at all, and growing rather than buying would have changed the settlement's position entirely. The experiment did not succeed, and Singapore's fortune came from being a port rather than a plantation. The garden today is a recreation rather than a survival, planted on the historical site. Crush a nutmeg leaf between your fingers — the smell is the whole reason the last five hundred years of this region happened the way they did.

6. Raffles House

Where the first Government House stood — and why it was on a hill nobody would climb.

A small bungalow marking the site of the first Government House, built in 1822 while Raffles was in Singapore. Putting it here was a deliberate act. The hill was Bukit Larangan, avoided by the Malay community as the burial ground of their kings; building the colonial residence on top of it said, unmistakably, who was in charge now. Practically it was also the coolest and driest ground with a view over the harbour, but the symbolism was not lost on anyone. The original bungalow is long gone, replaced by later Government Houses and eventually by the fort. What stands now is a reconstruction on the site, used as an event space. It is worth standing in front of and thinking about the sequence this walk has just gone through: royal burial ground, then governor's house, then gun battery, then bunker, then public park — five uses of one hill in six hundred years.

7. Armenian Church

The oldest church in Singapore, built by a community of about a hundred people.

The walk ends at the foot of the hill, at the Armenian Church of Saint Gregory the Illuminator, consecrated in 1835 and the oldest church building in Singapore. The Armenian community here never numbered more than a few hundred, and at the time this was built it was smaller than that — yet they funded a church designed by George Coleman, the Irish architect who laid out much of early colonial Singapore. Coleman adapted a classical plan to the tropics with deep porticoes and louvred openings, and the result is the most refined small building of its period in the city. In the memorial garden are gravestones moved here from the old Armenian cemetery, including that of Agnes Joaquim, who in the 1890s found in her garden the orchid hybrid that carries her name — Vanda Miss Joaquim, later chosen as Singapore's national flower. A community of a hundred people left the country its oldest church and its national flower.

The grounds and memorial garden are open and quiet, and entry is free. It is a two-minute walk from here to City Hall MRT if you are continuing into town.