Singapore

Why Singapore works

Singapore, officially the Republic of Singapore, is an island country in Southeast Asia whose territory comprises a main island, more than 60 satellite islands and islets, and one outlying islet, sitting about one degree of latitude, or 137 kilometres, north of the equator off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula. It borders the Strait of Malacca to the west, the Singapore Strait and Indonesia's Riau Islands to the south, the South China Sea to the east, and the Straits of Johor and Malaysia's State of Johor to the north. In its early history Singapore was a maritime trading post known as Temasek and later a constituent of several successive regional empires, before Stamford Raffles established it as a British trading post in 1819; it came under direct British control in 1867, was occupied by Japan during the Second World War from 1942, returned to Britain as a Crown colony in 1945, gained self-governance in 1959, and briefly joined the federation of Malaysia in 1963 before its expulsion led to full independence.

Singapore's main island, also called Pulau Ujong, is connected to Johor, Malaysia, by two man-made links, the Johor–Singapore Causeway and the Tuas Second Link, and the country's largest smaller islands include Jurong Island, Pulau Tekong, Pulau Ubin, and the resort island of Sentosa; its highest natural point, Bukit Timah Hill, rises to 163.63 metres. Land reclamation has expanded Singapore's area from roughly 580 square kilometres in the 1960s toward 770 square kilometres by the 2030s, an increase of more than 30 percent, in projects that have included merging smaller islands, as with Jurong Island, using sand drawn from rivers and beaches.

Among Singapore's landmarks, the Merlion, the Esplanade, Marina Bay Sands, Gardens by the Bay, Jewel Changi Airport, CHIJMES, the National Gallery Singapore, and the Singapore Flyer sit alongside the Orchard Road shopping belt and the Singapore Botanic Gardens, the country's first UNESCO World Heritage Site; most of these landmarks cluster in southern and eastern Singapore. Orchard Road, lined with multi-storey shopping centres and hotels, functions as the centre of the country's shopping and tourism activity, and the Singapore Tourism Board promotes the destination internationally under the "Singapore – Passion Made Possible" brand, unveiled jointly with the Economic Development Board in August 2017.

Singapore has a tropical rainforest climate with no distinct seasons, uniform temperature and pressure, high humidity, and abundant rainfall, with temperatures usually ranging from 23 to 32°C and a wetter monsoon season from November to February. Between July and October, haze from bush fires in neighbouring Indonesia, usually on the island of Sumatra, can affect air quality. Singapore keeps to the GMT+8 time zone, an hour ahead of the standard zone for its geography, which pushes sunrise and sunset unusually late in February, when the sun rises around 7:15 am and sets around 7:20 pm, while the earliest sunrise and sunset of the year fall in late October and early November.

Tourism is a major contributor to Singapore's economy, drawing 13.6 million international visitors in 2023, more than double the country's own population, and contributing about 3 percent of GDP on average in the decade before 2023, excluding the pandemic years; the sector generated roughly 8.6 percent of Singapore's employment in 2016. That scale of visitor traffic concentrates heavily around the country's landmark attractions and the Orchard Road district, reflecting a tourism industry built on a small, densely developed island rather than a large hinterland of destinations.

• Singapore — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0

Text adapted from the linked articles under CC BY-SA 4.0; edited for length.

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