Venessa Lee, Today Online 12 Dec 09;
It was an image straight out of Angkor Wat. The roots of the tree had sprawled over the building, threatening to swallow it whole. I'd seen pictures of those ancient temples, dwarfed by scary vegetation. But I wasn't in Cambodia, I was, incongruously, at Sentosa.
The structure I was looking at, with its wraparound tree roots, was a battery command post at Fort Serapong. Historians have always known about this fortification, which was built in the 1880s, along with the other colonial British defences on Sentosa: Fort Siloso, Fort Connaught and Mount Imbiah Battery. However, it was only a few years ago that Fort Serapong was excavated.
This, then, was the secret Sentosa, or at least a side of the resort island that is largely unknown to the public. With new attractions spouting up hither and thither, Sentosa had seemed to me to be in a permanent, somewhat obsessive state of renewal.
But history is deep in the bones of the island originally called Pulau Blakang Mati - enigmatically, "the island behind death" in Malay. The name "Sentosa" means "isle of tranquility".
"You're talking basically of military history until 1972," when Sentosa started to be developed for recreational use, said Mr Kwa Chong Guan, Adjunct Associate Professor at the Department of History, National University of Singapore (NUS).
Archaeologist Lim Chen Sian, who led the archaeological survey and excavation at Fort Serapong in April 2006, told of how his team had found "moveable artefacts" - all since removed - including "lots of ammunition, such as six-inch shells that weigh 60kg".
A sense could be gleaned of the lifestyle of British soldiers at the Fort Serapong complex, according to Mr Lim, 34. Milk and sardines had been part of their diet, he said. "We got a lot of sardine cans, lots of milk. They drank a lot of dairy products, more than beer, surprisingly."
With beer cans and bottles scarcer on the ground than milk bottles, apparent evidence of wholesome living also surfaced in the form of "bits from a Monopoly set you can date back to 1939, 1940", he said. His team had found pieces for the board game - the purse and the rocking horse - which had been replaced by the thimble and wheelbarrow by 1940.
Ms Wee Sheau Theng, 31, said she'd been asked to "sew pouches for the machetes (used) to clear the vegetation" in June 2006. What she hadn't reckoned on was meeting her future husband at the archaeological dig. The freelance teacher and researcher married Mr Yeo Kang Shua in May last year. The couple took their wedding photos at Fort Serapong and Mr Lim was their best man.
Due to ongoing archaeological and conservation work, Fort Serapong, in the eastern part of the resort island, is currently closed to the public. People have strayed into the fort before, perhaps oblivious of its value as being a part of Singapore history.
When Weekend Today visited, there was graffiti ("2001" and "Steven" were part of the scrawl) inside the casemates of the fort, which are storage and office facilities sometimes used to house guns. Beside some of the ruins, I even saw a skip with building materials dumped inside.
According to Associate Professor Brian Farrell, a military historian who specialises in the British empire and who is familiar with the project, Fort Serapong is not "unique" as "there were lots of coastal defence positions in and around this area".
Remnants of an eight-inch gun emplacement - a niche where weapons were positioned - can be found at Fort Serapong, Singapore's only such example, but such emplacements can be found "in different parts of the empire: Canada, the Caribbean and Australia", said Dr Farrell, from NUS' Department of History.
For Dr Farrell, the well-appointed and restored Fort Siloso is "one of the best military history sites that Singapore has to offer. It's the crown jewel in the Sentosa crown".
Today at Fort Siloso, another layer of history hovers, invisibly, at an unlikely building, the recreated Guardroom - a replica of an 1885 structure which visitors to the fort would have encountered. Representatives of Sentosa Leisure Group, which manages the resort island, identified the Guardroom, which has a battered-looking Union Jack hanging on a flagpole outside it, as being the residence of Singapore's longest-serving political detainee, Mr Chia Thye Poh, for three years.
Mr Chia was arrested under the Internal Security Act in 1966 for alleged involvement with the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM). He was moved to Sentosa under a restriction order in May 1989, and after his conditional release, denied that he was ever involved with the CPM. Mr Chia was unconditionally released in 1992.
Visitors to Sentosa occasionally asked where Mr Chia had lived while he was at the island according to representatives of Sentosa Leisure Group. "He did translation work for us," said Mr Alvin Chia of Sentosa Leisure Group.
The deputy director (attractions development) also mentioned other, secret parts of Sentosa. In the western region of the island, for instance, there are birds' nests "made by edible-nest swiftlets and black-nest swiftlets", he said, which were poached until the authorities barred access to the area via locked gates.
The historical aspects of Sentosa - as a prolific pirates' lair, for instance - point to the violence that once lurked at the island's now-sanitised beaches. Take its enigmatic old name, Blakang Mati, which has been variously theorised as having been given because of regular and fatal malaria outbreaks, or because of the murder of a local Malay.
"One suggestion," according to NUS' Mr Kwa, who specialises in Singapore history, "was that this was the old execution grounds for the Orang Laut, the sea nomads who were the warriors of the old sultans".
Shock and horror visited Sentosa in 1983, when seven people died as cable cars plunged into the sea in an accident well remembered by Singaporeans.
Earlier, in 1974, 14 human skeletons were discovered on Sentosa's beach. Police believed that Singapore-based trafficking syndicates had brought the illegal immigrants from nearby islands, collected their "fares" and murdered them.
Today, the historical aspects of Sentosa can be seen even beneath the glossy patinas of new hotels and restaurants.
Capella Singapore was once a British Officers' Mess and Amara Sanctuary Resort Sentosa once the Sergeant Quarters, for example. The serene lines of those colonial buildings are the framework for these hotels, and other buildings like them.
Secretive Sentosa is there to be found - you just have to know where to look.
The people in their neighbourhood
Venessa Lee, Today Online 12 Dec 09;
Mr Masturi Lehwan, 55, grew up in the kampung that was once located at the site of Sentosa's integrated resort, Resorts World. Now a golf course supervisor, he met his wife, Ms Asmah Aziz, while working on the island. The couple have been working at Sentosa for more than 30 years.
Mr Masturi, like others in the kampung, was made to move out in the early 1970s. His parents and their eight children moved to a three-room flat in Telok Blangah but he returned to work on the island in 1972. He said the golf course, where he has spent a large part of his working life, is his favourite part of Sentosa.
Ms Asmah, 51, started as a bus guide on Sentosa, and is now a receptionist there. Ms Asmah's favourite part of Sentosa is an area at Tanjong Beach where she used to go fishing with her father.
Ms Chua Bee Tin, 48, used to be "kampung mates" with Mr Masturi. She started working at Sentosa in 1978. She has worked mostly as a monorail operator in Sentosa but, since the monorail system closed, she now drives the Sentosa Express, the train that ferries visitors from the island to the VivoCity shopping mall and back. Ms Chua's favourite place in Sentosa relates to her youth: "I like Fort Siloso most, my childhood playground. We played in the tunnel there."
Asked about the fast pace of changes that have taken place at Sentosa since the 1970s, all three expressed pride and hopes that visitor numbers would rise.
Ms Asmah said: "I saw the changes from this island from nothing to something." Mr Masturi said: "In the name of progress, I think we lose out something like quietness." Venessa Lee
