The-Accountant-Jan-Feb-2018

TRAVEL
Raffles, who had been born at sea, off the
coast of faraway Jamaica, on a ship, the
Ann, captained by his debt-burdened
father. Young Raffles was sent to boarding
school in England, but left at the age of 14
to take up a clerkship in London with the
British East India Company, the rapacious
capitalist state-within-a-state that shipped
away the wealth of the East to feed vast
commercial fortunes in the British capital.
Before he died at the age of 44, Raffles had
written a seminal history of Java, mastered
the Malay language, been Knighted
by the Prince Regent, and assigned to
increasingly important positions in the
Colonial administration of the Far East. A
keen anthropologist and the first president
of the Zoological Society of London, he
founded the London Zoo.
However it was the re-establishment
of Singapore as the hub of Far East trade,
greater even than Hong Kong, that was
the crowning achievement of Raffles’s life,
and his fascination with, and profound
respect for, the culture of the East made
him enduringly popular in Singapore even
today. There are two statues of Raffles in
the city-state, one at the landing site that
still bears his name, and another at the
Empress Palace, but the most imposing
monument of all is the Raffles Hotel
Singapore, at the head of Beach Road.
The hotel was opened in 1887 by the
fabulously wealthy Armenian Sarkies
brothers, founders of the Eastern and
Oriental in Penang. No expense was
spared in expanding and improving the
hotel in its early years and, one hundred
years later, the independent Government
of Singapore declared it a National
JANUARY - FEBRUARY 2018 71