Palace of Ghosts: Singapore's Untold History

Fresh off the Boat: New Friends in Singapore When the youthful Tan Yeok Nee first befriended Abu Bakar at his father’s residential compound at Telok Blangah in Singapore, neither of them could have known how transformational the friendship and, later on, the partnership would become. Those days were, however, still a long way off when Tan first stepped off the boat and onto the shores of Malaya and Singapore. Among immigration societies like Hong Kong and Singapore, there so often appears to be an inverse relationship embedded in the origin stories of how staggering wealth sprouted from humble beginnings: the more successful a tycoon eventually became, the more desperately eccentric his debut in the world of business seemed to be. Hong Kong’s Li Ka-shing starting out as a street vendor of plastic flowers comes to mind. However, it’s not just unique to immigrants nor to Asia: the 1960s entertainment sketch “The Four Yorkshiremen,” immortalized by England’s Monty Python off-beat comedy t...

Introduction: The Life and Times of Tan Yeok Nee Tan Yeok Nee is a towering figure in the history of 19th-century Johor and Singapore. He started out as a youthful immigrant from China, enduring indentured labour on his arrival in Pahang. He eventually became one of the most powerful men in Johor and Singapore during the 1860s-1880s. Today he has streets named after him in Johor Bahru and buildings that bear his name in Singapore. More fundamentally, however, we see everyday the successful economies of Johor and Singapore and the ever improving livelihoods of their inhabitants. Although he played a major, and foundational, role in creating this phenomenon, relatively little is known about him. This is the first post I have published in some months in the on-going story about the writing of  Palace of Ghosts . The reason for the break is that when I first had the idea to include a post on Tan Yeok Nee, who is an important yet secondary character in Palace of Ghosts, I imagined that...