A Luxury Train Ride From Singapore to Malaysia Redefines “Heritage”

Somewhat over two centuries in the past, British capitalist Stamford Raffles planted a buying and selling publish at Malaysia’s dangling tip and named it after Singapura, historic Sanskrit for “lion metropolis.” Laborers from China, India, and higher Malaysia heaved mountains of earth into the muddy estuary of the Singapore River to create new land for builders to put the city-state’s foundations. The funding paid off, a minimum of for the capitalists. Singapore, at this time in regards to the dimension of New York Metropolis, is a worldwide business heart—a secure, environment friendly, English-speaking, litter-free outpost for Western firms in the hunt for Asian markets, and vice versa. 

Positive, jaded leisure vacationers may discover it a tad uninteresting in contrast with regal Bangkok or clamorous Hong Kong, however the enterprise of Singapore is enterprise, and all the time has been. The nationwide mindset is pragmatic, unsentimental, and profit-oriented. In a spot the place area is eternally at a premium, the churn of property growth—construct, tear down, rebuild greater, repeat—is what plowing the land is to an awesome agricultural nation: a cyclical harvest, even a patriotic future. Actual property hypothesis and its twin, banking, have supplied the generations the surest approach to sow ambition and reap prosperity, making religion in future progress virtually a geographic function. From the highest of One Raffles Place, as soon as the tallest skyscraper in all of Asia, the financial outlook is sort of invariably sunny.

“Singapore is future-positive,” is how the Australian architect Richard Hassell put it to me once we met at 21 Carpenter, a lodge designed by his agency, WOHA Architects. Our dialog got here halfway by means of my keep within the metropolis, which was to be the purpose of departure for a prepare journey by means of Malaysia on Belmond’s Eastern & Oriental Express. Earlier than setting off, I wished to discover the town itself. Above all, I used to be interested in what a relentless give attention to progress may imply for guests drawn to historical past and tradition—guests, like me, who sometimes keep away from vivid, shiny, ultramodern cities. 

On my wanderings thus far I’d seen low-rise neighborhoods of mom-and-pop retailers, Anglican churchyards, and manicured parks, all dwarfed by glass-and-steel skyscrapers. I’d seen architectural doodads of delirious invention and vine-hung eco-utopian prototypes for the climate-change future. Every part of the previous had its personal imaginative and prescient of tomorrow. “Singapore could be very pro-change,” Hassell agreed, explaining that when change equals funding and funding equals revenue, individuals can’t wait to maneuver on to the subsequent factor.

The latest subsequent factor is symbolized by 21 Carpenter, the place Hassell fitted 48 rooms right into a tower wrapped up in a perforated, heat-deflecting aluminum solar cover. The novelty is at floor stage, the place the tower’s base rises not from land scraped clear of its previous however from a restored 1936 remittance home—an early monetary establishment utilized by Chinese language laborers to ship their earnings house. 

Hassell preserved the unique stucco façade and tiled roof. He additionally learn employees’ letters house to their households and gathered poignant phrases—bits of discovered poetry—to inscribe on the solar cover. The brand new constructing bears witness to the previous metropolis, preserving the tales of forgotten immigrant employees, the individuals who constructed Singapore. After its opening final yr, the Singapore Institute of Architects named it the 2024 design of the yr.

Heritage was the buzzword of my journey, shorthand for the pendulum swing away from a raze-and-replace mentality towards certainly one of restore and refurbish. The motion started within the Nineteen Eighties with adaptive-reuse initiatives in Chinatown’s historic shop-houses, then grew to incorporate main websites like New Bahru, a former highschool transformed into an eat-shop-stay campus. 

The which means of heritage has additionally continued to increase. Raffles Singapore, as soon as a logo of British colonial snobbery, reopened in 2019 after an estimated $200 million restoration with new décor and a brand new self-image. “Heritage can be tales,” in-house historian Nazir Yusof advised me. Raffles educated a next-gen workforce to diversify its storytelling, bringing ignored voices into its account of the colonial period, which on this a part of the world has too usually represented solely the British expertise—the colonialists’ level of view. 

In 2023, Raffles awarded its writing residency to a Singaporean for the primary time. Poet Madeleine Lee’s ensuing assortment, The right way to Construct a Lux Resort, is a local daughter’s intimate and humorous view of the grande dame—a peek up her skirt, because it have been. The subsequent residency went to Taiwan-born, Paris-trained, Singapore-based chef André Chiang, who produced a ebook brimming with tales and recipes; its current publication precedes the opening of a brand new Chiang restaurant at Raffles later this yr.

Elsewhere on the town, savvy entrepreneurs are feeding the heritage development by making historical past from scratch. Witness the neo–Artwork Deco bar Atlas, a fixture on the World’s 50 Finest record, or the brand-new old-timey consuming spot with the on-the-nose identify of Nice Nanyang Heritage Café.

In the meantime, the E&O Categorical is a celebration of the area’s creative legacy and pure biodiversity. I booked a three-night journey by means of the Malay Peninsula, departing from Singapore. The journey supplied stops to hike a rainforest full of gibbons and to tour George City, the pre-Singapore British entrepôt the place an elite strata of Chinese language-Malay households often called Peranakans constructed elaborate mansions. 

After I received again to Singapore, I discovered that August 2025 would mark 60 years for the reason that city-state declared its independence and positioned management of a melting-pot individuals within the arms of Lee Kuan Yew, its first prime minister. From 1959 to 1990, LKY, as he’s recognized, engineered the nation’s rise from postcolonial poverty to first-world prosperity. Right now he’s considered a nationwide hero, a founding father as visionary as FDR and shrewd as LBJ. What I noticed on the eve of the historic milestone was a rustic actively reassessing its exceptional rise, not solely centered on a headlong rush into the long run but in addition discovering the ability of its personal numerous historical past. 

Boarding the stately hunter-green-and-Devonshire-cream Jap & Oriental Categorical at Singapore’s Woodlands prepare station, the third factor I fixated on—after the excessive crew-to-guest ratio and the acres of inside marquetry—was the boarding go. The ultra-thick paper was match for a royal invitation, and the Artwork Deco design featured an elongated tiger, as if frozen halfway between the previous and the long run. “The lure of Malaysia in movement,” learn the motto. I laid the invitation on a tea desk set with porcelain and silver, ran my hand over an emerald velvet armchair, and petted a dragon-embroidered pillow. Minor particulars, maybe, given the cinematic three-night journey forward, however the effective paper and materials caught the spirit of the refurbished E&O: analog, fancy, and enjoyable. 

Because the prepare sped into the gathering nightfall and a piano-sax duo performed Jazz Age ditties, 40-odd passengers, some wearing black tie and formal attire, mingled over cocktails like friends at a country-house weekend. One fellow produced a deck of playing cards from his dinner jacket—the onboard magician. He requested the lady nearest him to choose a card, look, and return it, face down, to the deck. Then the magician pulled a recent lime from his pocket and sliced it open to disclose a folded card. She unfolded it: the queen of golf equipment, the identical card she had picked from the deck. 

The subsequent morning, the prepare got here to a halt in the midst of wild Malaysia, proper alongside Taman Negara Nationwide Park. The trainload of passengers, now kitted out for a jungle tour, stepped out into tropical warmth and loaded right into a caravan of open-air jeeps to discover the park. Our introduction to Malaysia would start with the backstory—method, method again. 

The rainforest that quickly enveloped us has been evolving for some 130 million years. At our first cease within the park, our information confirmed us the jungle cover from above, from a platform with spectacular views of primordial forests and distant mountain peaks. Farther in, we adopted a mountaineering path beneath the orchid-hung cover. Keening gibbons within the valley to our left have been answered by a troop to our proper. The area’s few remaining elephants and tigers, we have been advised, moved unseen by means of the park’s hidden reaches. We returned for lunch on the rails and watched countless miles of palm-oil plantations roll previous the home windows, former wilderness traded for revenue. 

In fact, it was the fats of this land—wealth from nutmeg, then rubber and palm oil—that drew the British to Malaysia. Greater than 30 years earlier than Singapore’s founding, the Union Jack flew over the state of Penang, throughout a slender strait from the place the E&O eased to a cease at Butterworth station. 

The British East India Firm’s city plan for George City, the capital of the state of Penang, stays intact, and I toured the gridded streets from a recumbent place, laid out like a bunch of bananas on the basket-chair of a bicycle rickshaw. Its driver, Mr. Lim, pedaled me previous the blindingly white Eastern & Oriental Hotel—opened because the Jap in 1884 by the Persian-Armenian Sarkies brothers and unaffiliated with Belmond’s E&O Categorical—and delivered me to 2 colourful heritage homes. 

The primary was an indigo-blue mansion constructed within the late nineteenth century by merchant-prince Cheong Fatt Tze and styled as a mah-jongg parlor within the film Loopy Wealthy Asians. Its complement, previously the house of tycoon and philanthropist Chung Keng Quee and now the Pinang Peranakan Mansion, was painted the exact food-coloring inexperienced of Malaysian pandan cake. The grand Peranakan households represented a fast social ascent: from immigrant labor to service provider class to tycoons in a century. They spoke the Queen’s English, commemorated Buddhist deities, served Malay curries on porcelain, and stuffed their homes with a mixture of Chinese language antiques, French enamel, and furnishings within the Georgian model—right here richly adorned with dragons and phoenixes. “We’re a fusion nation,” Mr. Lim defined.

The E&O was Singapore-bound once more when prepare supervisor Wolfgang Eipeldauer dropped by my cabin to attach a couple of dots. Earlier than the current revamp, he advised me, the prepare harked again to “a British hill-house veranda within the tropics.” For the present incarnation, he mentioned, “we purposefully tried to concentrate to the regional and the native.” The concept was to right the tendency, widespread in luxurious hospitality, to see colonial opulence solely by means of British eyes. The brand new E&O, just like the previous Peranakan elite, spans two worlds.

On his method out, Eipeldauer prompt I make time for a espresso with Kishen Muruganandan, the bar supervisor. I made an appointment and met him within the plush caboose. Muruganandan was Malaysian, he advised me whereas brewing a cup, as was a lot of the younger crew. The espresso beans have been Malaysian, grown by a neighbor in his house village. The trendy crew uniforms, he replied once I requested about them, have been Malaysian, created by a designer in Kuala Lumpur. I caught Eipeldauer’s drift: to study heritage, speak to somebody for whom it’s a birthright. Malaysia in movement, certainly.

Singapore refutes the previous adage about land—right here they are nonetheless making it. It was the day after the E&O rolled again into Woodlands station, and I used to be luxuriously billeted at Raffles Singapore. After breakfast within the Tiffin Room, I joined a lodge tour led by Yusof, the in-house historian. “This was a seaside home,” he advised us, launching into the story of the Sarkies brothers. 

Flush with money from the success of their Jap Resort in George City, they opened Raffles in 1887 with 10 rooms throughout from the seaside, maybe taking Sir Stamford’s surname to recommend a starchier British pedigree than they themselves possessed. Right now the waterfront is 2½ miles away: Singapore has added roughly 25 % extra land since Independence. 

Raffles has grown at a significantly greater price. Its 10-acre hospitality-retail advanced now accommodates 115 suites, seven eating places and bars, and a platinum-card-melting procuring arcade. Looky-loo vacationers with selfie sticks continuously stream previous the white-on-white high-Victorian façade of pediments, pilasters, and forged iron. The constructing has been an official nationwide monument since 1987, Yusof advised me with the indulgence of a father whose baby is commonly complimented by strangers. 

It’s, in actual fact, one thing greater than that. Just like the Eiffel Tower and the Empire State Constructing, Raffles is a logo of the town, even a flagship for the nation, defined a Singaporean wine importer I met for drinks on the Lengthy Bar, house to the rather-too-sweet Singapore Sling. He likened Raffles to a state climate vane: it all the time factors towards the long run. A tropical haven for vacationers within the imperial “golden age,” the lodge later hosted LKY’s wedding ceremony reception (the town’s first prime minister returned yearly for anniversary dinners) and now could be a gilt emporium for the worldwide wealthy. As Raffles goes, so goes the nation, the wine importer mentioned.

I used to be stunned, then, that the concierge despatched me immediately to the Intan, a non-public museum in a distant residential quarter the place the curator-docent-occupant-in-chief was a voluble Peranakan storyteller named Alvin Yapp. He confirmed me his 1,500-piece assortment of ornamental arts, then over tea he expounded a idea. Singapore’s cosmopolitan enterprise savvy, Yapp proposed, may be attributed to the cross-cultural fluency of its Peranakan citizenry. About three-quarters of Singapore’s residents declare Chinese language descent and, on the similar time, English is its mom tongue and enterprise lingua franca. In different phrases, the city-state’s mental framework consists of a language, authorized code, parliamentary system, and free-market orthodoxy, all left behind by the British after they vacated their columned administrative buildings. The consequence has been profound. “We predict like Westerners,” Yapp mentioned with an ironic smile.

After tea on the museum, I had drinks with a poet. Madeleine Lee was ready for me in Raffles’s Writers Bar, dressed within the edgy black avant-garb of a recent artwork seller. The title of her ebook, The right way to Construct a Lux Resort, prompt an instruction guide. The elegant poems inside offered this conclusion: you construct it with individuals. Lee advised me she studied the changeable dramatis personae at Raffles throughout a dozen stays by speaking to bartenders and observing maids and gardeners making their rounds and friends drifting by means of the spangly foyer. Lee mentioned she tried to seize the emotional really feel of the place as a result of a lot had already been mentioned about “the founders, the structure, the entire colonial factor.” 

I used to be curious what a poet, together with her sensitivity to language, would make of the phrase heritage, which by this level within the journey had totally occupied my thoughts. Lee thought for a second and described the “household dialect” of blended Malay, English, and Mandarin spoken in lots of Singaporean properties. “We throw the whole lot in a pot and converse ‘Singlish.’ ”

At a literal crossroads of tradition, heritage may have nuances, she continued. There are the sturdy info of textbook historical past; then there are household tales and a person’s personal emotional biography—a grandfather’s story of arriving in Singapore with one small suitcase, for instance. Heritage is the previous, Lee mentioned, but it surely should be saved recent. “For those who don’t know the place you got here from, you can’t recognize at this time and the long run.”

I began to surprise: how previous does one thing should be to qualify as heritage? The responses I received from others have been inconsistent. Somebody mentioned the cutoff was 1900, one other mentioned 1965. “It’s heritage if it’s entwined with our metropolis’s previous,” replied a Gen Z Singaporean. What a few skyscraper from 2000? “That’s the current,” she mentioned. 

Architect Richard Hassell proposed that heritage is a constructing sufficiently old to tear down. Twenty-five years after building, when supplies get tatty and tastes change, is the hazard time. If the constructing survives longer, somebody will embrace its classic cool and maybe a consensus will consolidate across the “authenticity of its occasions,” profitable it authorities safety. 

Hassell cited a 1982 concrete ziggurat close to Orchard Boulevard by American architect John Portman, inventor of the atrium lodge. His innovation swept the world—glass elevators have been to lodge structure what Juice Newton was to Prime-10 radio—after which, simply as shortly, turned unspeakably outdated. Renovated and reopened in 2024 beneath the identify Conrad Singapore Orchard, Portman’s design now defines the reducing fringe of heritage.

Heritage doesn’t should be stuff, nevertheless. No much less an authority than UNESCO conferred on Singapore’s hawker tradition—the custom of consuming at public markets and meals halls—the standing of “intangible heritage.” (Within the identify of reportage, I went out for a plate of tangibly satisfying Hainanese hen rice.) 

The entire image got here collectively for me at Candlenut, a restaurant in a restored British military barracks throughout from the Singapore Botanic Gardens. The waiter defined that the dishes by chef Malcolm Lee, who identifies as Peranakan, have been impressed by household recipes his mom and grandmother taught him and made utilizing native elements as a result of early Peranakan households, fashioned by means of a Chinese language-Malay union, needed to work with what little they’d. 

“That’s the story of Peranakan delicacies,” mentioned the waiter. I requested if the model of cooking was well-liked with Singaporeans. “It’s a part of their heritage,” he answered. The meal was definitely scrumptious—the restaurant has been awarded a Michelin star. The expertise stayed with me not due to the chef’s technical abilities however as a result of the meal advised the story of a nation. 

After I touched down at Singapore Changi Airport 10 days earlier, I had wished to study what a future-forward society like Singapore does with its personal previous. Candlenut had the reply, and it goes one thing like this: the Lion Metropolis has taken the measure of its success and, in glancing again over its shoulder, has rediscovered what’s new once more. 

A model of this story first appeared within the August 2025 concern of Journey + Leisure beneath the headline “Time Journey.”