A Cenotaph for Singapore: Contestation and Community at the Straits Settlements War Memorial

The Singapore Cenotaph is a First World War memorial built when the island-city was a British colony. The design of the monument and its use in Remembrance Day celebrations by the British colonial administration departed from the less overtly patriotic commemorative practices common in Europe in the 1920s. Regardless of the social significance the British administration hoped to vest in the monument when it was commissioned, contemporary English- and Chinese-language sources indicate that British authorities had little control over this ‘sacred’ space at the heart of their administrative capital, and the Asian populations of Singapore freely interpreted it as they wished, sometimes reworking the official meaning to suit their own ends.