A garden under glass, a skyline from 56 floors up, a ferry to the last kampong.

Singapore’s modern founding is usually dated to January 1819, when Stamford Raffles, an agent of the British East India Company, negotiated a trading post at the mouth of the Singapore River with the local Malay ruler — a strategic bet on the island’s position astride the Strait of Malacca that made it one of the busiest ports in the world within decades. The British colony grew as a free port drawing Chinese, Malay, Indian and Arab traders and labourers, whose settlements became today’s Chinatown, Kampong Glam and Little India; it fell to Japanese forces in February 1942, in what Winston Churchill called the worst disaster in British military history, and was occupied until 1945. Singapore joined the Federation of Malaysia in 1963 but was expelled just two years later, becoming fully independent — reluctantly, and with famously few natural resources — on 9 August 1965. What followed, under Lee Kuan Yew’s first government, was one of the fastest transformations of the twentieth century: a small, resource-poor island turned itself into a major financial and shipping hub in a single generation, largely through deliberate policy on housing, education, land use and trade rather than any accident of geography.

That same deliberateness shows in how the city was built. Marina Bay itself is reclaimed land, extended in stages from the 1970s onward, and the Gardens by the Bay conservatories and Supertree Grove, opened in 2012, sit on ground that did not exist within living memory. Singapore’s “garden city” planning, launched by Lee Kuan Yew in 1967 as a deliberate counter to the pollution of rapid industrialisation, now governs everything from mandatory green cover on new buildings to the tree-lined expressways visitors notice on the ride in from Changi. The multicultural mix that Raffles’ free port first drew together has become the country’s defining social fact rather than a historical footnote: four official languages, Peranakan or Straits Chinese culture blending Chinese and Malay traditions in Katong’s shophouses, and a Housing and Development Board system that has deliberately mixed ethnic groups within public housing blocks since the 1980s. Marina Bay Sands, its three towers topped by the SkyPark that opened in 2010, has become the city’s most photographed symbol of that same instinct: a single, engineered gesture, built to be unmistakable, on land that was open water within its own architects’ lifetimes.