Issue 14

Celebrated travel writer and novelist Colin Thubron revisits Singapore in this TOS exclusive, while June Lee gets to know the veteran wanderer

‘If I only write when I felt like it,’ quips Englishman Colin Thubron, ‘I’d still be on my first book.’ Luckily for his readers, the prolific travel writer and novelist has been writing diligently for 40 years, challenging the inaccessibility of areas such as the Middle East, Siberia, China’s Silk Road and the former Soviet Union. 

Thubron’s first book was Mirror to Damascus (1968), for which he left London and lived in Syria for a year. He immersed himself in the country and language and emerged with enough material to write a lyrically charged book (a routine he would follow for many years). His latest, Shadow of the Silk Road (2006), details a 7,000- mile journey from Xian, China, to the Turkish coastal city of Antioch.The award-winning writer’s appeal hasn’t diminished – Penguin recently reissued his best work – and his prose still sheds a light on the world’s darker corners. 

‘There was the demon of Stalinist Moscow, and behind it, the yellow peril of China – countries that you were brought up to be afraid of,’ Thubron says. ‘I was drawn to these countries that needed explanation; I wanted to give them a human face.’ Yet he swings like a pendulum between these detailed, almost anthropological works, and fiction novels that deal more with human nature than wider societies. The first book to bridge his imagined and physical worlds, To the Last City (2002), was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. True to character, it brought his trademark gritty realism to an adventure set in the remote remains of the Inca civilisation in Peru. 

‘[Switching genres] gives me the satisfaction of not writing the same thing year after year,’ says Thubron, who still writes his novels out in longhand before transcribing them onto the ‘ephemeral’ screen, as he refers to it. For this miniature snapshot of Singapore, Thubron turned to email to chronicle his fleeting passage through our tiny city-state – en route once again, at the age of 68, to strange and inaccessible places. 

‘Remembering Singapore’ 
A ghost is walking beside me through the streets of Singapore. It is wearing a cheap nylon shirt and tattered trousers. Far from being threatening, it is thin and rather lost. It is my youthful self passing through the city in a single day in 1965 on my way between Saigon and Damascus. 
In those days Singapore seemed like a genteel port with few buildings higher than the Raffles Hotel. Now I recognise almost nothing. Instead I am shattered by a high-rise metropolis that glitters at night like Manhattan. 
I hunt for my remembered city. Where, for instance, is the once-famous Change Alley? I remember it as a dark tunnel hung with a jungle of clothes. Now I find a few well-behaved shops and stalls immured in the marble underbelly of the Hitachi Tower. 
Only the gateway of the Sri Mariamman Temple on South Bridge Road, with its gaudy figures banked up like some fantastical audience, brings a shock of recognition. Even Chinatown (and how strange for such a Chinese city to have a discrete Chinatown!) has become a knowing version of its past self, its painted shutters and red lanterns beckoning to tourists. 
So after a few miles’ walking, my memories start to thin away before the vividness of the new: of a city remaking itself in a landscape of cranes and glass towers. Now it seems like the first time I have ever been here. The remembered past has been overlaid by the steel glitter of the present. And when I turn to look, the ghost beside me has gone. © Colin Thubron