Land, Sea and Weather: Nature's Gift to Singapore

For many Singapore residents and visitors alike, the heat, humidity, and heavy downpours appear consistent and relentless–random and frequent bouts of intense weather. When it rains, it really rains hard, and yet it remains hot, cooling noticeably in the hours after the downpour dissipates. Sometimes, it seems to be simultaneously raining and sunny! 

Having spent my childhood in the dreary north of England’s cold drizzle, I know a little bit about rain, but in Singapore, the rain is astonishing in its often damaging power and volume. A tropical storm, including the frequent Sumatra squalls that scurry across the Straits of Malacca, hit Singapore like a sledgehammer. It is an amazing spectacle. It is a genuinely awesome demonstration of nature’s raw power. Despite billions the dollars spent by Singapore on canals and drainage systems, Singaporeans regularly receive SMS notifications about the dangers posed by flash floods, falling trees, and other weather-related mayhem. 

Washed-up, three meter long, estuarine crocodiles show up on the roadside (yes, really); oversized tropical birds who spend their lives in the jungle canopy would all of a sudden find shelter on residential verandahs or balconies; there are occasional news stories about giant pythons sheltering in toilet bowls who are surprised by unsuspecting human visitors to Singapore’s public lavatories; in days gone by, a problem now addressed by Singapore's hard working legion of government engineers, long dead corpses would suddenly end up floating around in flooded cemeteries. More recently, posh shopping malls have been suddenly inundated by a deluge of muddy flood water. 

However, to anyone paying a little more attention, the weather patterns are far from random, and have followed the same sequence since time immemorial.

English people like to talk about the weather, and I am no exception to this eccentric national quirk. One of the main differences between my country of origin and my adopted home of Singapore is that, in Southeast Asia, the weather, or specifically the monsoon cycles, are of major consequence. Of course, weather patterns are important everywhere, impacting agriculture, water resources, ecosystems and biodiversity. It even affects people’s mood, a fact that played a not insignificant part in my decision to leave England’s cold damp shores. The weather alone, however, is only half the story. 

In Singapore, the significance of the monsoon cycles is emphasised by its geography, especially its position on the sea lanes that span the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Whilst this massive area of the globe is subject to the same monsoon cycles that impact the rest of Southeast Asia and beyond, it is unique in Singapore and its’ environs because of the relatively sheltered passage of the Straits of Malacca, shielded by the mountains of Sumatra to the southeast and those of the Malay peninsula to the northwest. The monsoon winds are there, for sure, but they are a little kinder because of these mountain barriers. The combination of meteorology and geography is the reason people came and congregated in the region of Singapore to begin with. It is therefore the most fundamental piece of context to the story of Palace of Ghosts. 

Fundamentally, the monsoon cycles consist of two very significant variations in the weather patterns in an overall 12-month period. Singapore has two monsoon seasons: the Northeast Monsoon, from December to early March, and Southwest Monsoon, from June to September. During these alternating periods, the winds blow quite consistently in opposite directions, as their names indicate. These annual patterns have been repeated for as long as humans have walked the earth and sailed the seas.

If a child was given a map of Asia and asked to draw a line that traced the shortest route by sea between the continental land masses of the ancient and mighty civilisations of India and China, such a line would invariably pass close to shores where the tip of mainland Southeast Asian meets that of maritime Southeast Asia. In other words, the islands of Singapore, Batam, Bintan, and the other thousands of islands of the Riau archipelago–the "Negara Selat". There’s no avoiding them. The term “Nagara Selat”, meaning the “Realm of Riau”, is being popularised by, arguably, Southeast Asia’s leading historian, Dr Leonard Y. Andaya.

On the map, the maritime passage between India and China looks like a giant “V”, with the tip of the Malay peninsula (Singapore and Riau) sitting perfectly at the junction. It was as if geography and meteorology had conspired to gift this location with the unique quality of being the ideal staging post, allowing mariners to rest before taking advantage of the reliable switch of wind direction to continue their journey.

Such movement of people and trade brought a diversity of cultures, ideas, and money, all meeting and concentrating in a relatively small locale. In turn, creating a fertile ground for the cross pollination of ideas. Singapore’s modern embrace of a multicultural population, its promotion of an information society, and the presence of a seemingly bottomless vault of wealth is the basic recipe for its success, both then and now. Although this is also the context for the chosen beginning point of the Palace Ghosts, this potent recipe of human and natural forces converging has always been there. It is the changing political environment which created the inflection point overlain by the resulting economic outcome.

The period covered by Palace of Ghosts includes the rise and fall of many administrations and individuals, but none would have been there in the first place had geography and meteorology not conspired to create the perfect stage on which events played out.