Merdeka and Much More: Reminiscences of a Raffles Professor, 1953-67

7 The Padang

THE PADANG 57 57 7 The Padang H eavy rain had closed our hatches for several hours. We were still at anchor when our scheduled sailing time came. Our winches whined and clattered. Chinese labourers shouted to their companions down below shouting back, as our derricks hauled up cargo from the twakows (barges) hard against us. I sat on deck in a rattan arm chair, watching this frantic yet disciplined effort. A warm evening fell. The lights of Singapore and those on other ships anchored nearby, their cables taut against the pulling tide, shone on the turgid water. Beyond them was the land. We were directly opposite the graceful old cathedral, built by convicts a hundred years earlier (1856–62) and the even older park, the village green of Singapore, the padang. It had been the custom in particular for the well-to-do of all races of 19th-century Singapore to circle the padang in their carriages in the comparative cool of the late afternoon. As I sat back with a cold beer for company I was reminded of the tale of the young civil servant who imported an elegant carriage and a pair of prancing ponies from Hong Kong. His wife, as she bowed to the others, even to the wife of the governor, was sure that she sat in the smartest carriage of them all. Next morning he was summoned before His Excellency. “You’ll have to get rid of that carriage, m’boy,” he was told. “But why sir?” he asked, nervous but bristling, with a sense of petticoat interference. “Those Chinese characters on the door; know what they mean?” “No sir. I thought they were merely attractive symbols for long life and good luck.” MERDEKA AND MUCH MORE 58 “Nothing of the sort. They say ‘my name is Mai Lun, and my price is ten dollars.’” Mai Lun has long gone, but the padang has remained, the core of Singapore. No other Chinese city has this green heart. It is the legacy of Stamford Raffles, when in 1819 he laid out the initial plans for this new settlement. The padang has survived the centuries unscathed, witness not merely to the passing peccadilloes and pleasures of its people, but a participant as well in the humiliation, excitement and pride of the island’s history. In 1942, to go no further back in that history, all those Europeans on the island who had not fled, men, women and children, joined all the defeated British-led troops assembled there on February 17, before they began the long march to Salarang or Changi. July 5, 1943 had it playing host again to a packed concourse of troops, this time the Indian National Army volunteers and opportunists who marched past its commander, Chandra Bose, under the watchful eye of the Japanese Premier, Tojo. A wildly cheering crowd occupying every conceivable vantage place packed the padang on September 12, 1945, when Lord Louis Mountbatten took the salute at the Victory Parade, having earlier accepted there the surrender of the Japanese forces. And then later the padang came to be used for stirring National Day parades or on other significant occasions. One such occasion in which we participated was in early 1954. Tan Lark Sye, leader of the Hokkien community and multimillionaire President of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, had 1,000 guests to a banquet there. Following a congratulatory telegram to Mao Tse Tung on the communist accession to power in China, he had called for the establishment in Singapore of a Chinese-language university. This dinner was to report progress, as its building in Jurong began to overshadow the modest Englishlanguage university at Bukit Timah. The concept had aroused great excitement among the mass of Chinese proud of the success of their homeland. The colonial government (and the Englishspeaking element of the community) were appalled. The dinner, THE PADANG 59 where thousands of spectators crowded against rope barriers, gave a most disturbing implication of a divided country. By 1954 hundreds of Chinese students were leaving for China each month, while the thousands who remained, attending the Chinese-language Middle Schools into their early 20s, were dominated by the fanatical activists already indoctrinated by their anti-colonial pro-communist teachers. Singapore was a classic example of a state with two incompatible education systems. Its collapse could be anticipated. The skilful exit of the colonial power and the...