Mobilities
Vol. 5, No. 2, 177–195, May 2010

1745-0101 Print/1745-011X Online/10/020177–19 © 2010 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/17450101003665010

Capital and the Transfiguring 
Monumentality of Raffles Hotel

DANIEL P. S. GOH

Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore

Taylor and FrancisRMOB_A_467023.sgm10.1080/17450101003665010Mobilities1745-0101 (print)/1745-011X (online)Original Article2010Taylor & Francis52000000May 2010DanielGohsocgohd@nus.edu.sg

ABSTRACT Celebrated as a leading luxury hotel in the world, the Raffles Hotel stands as a
monument to Singapore’s status as a global city of commerce. The century-old Hotel also
represents successful postcolonial heritage conservation. Drawing from archival and
published sources, I analyze the Hotel as a changing cultural form in the historical transfor-
mation of Singapore by the circuits of global capital, from imperial capitalism, through the
postcolonial development of national capitalism, to the current phase of neoliberal globaliza-
tion. Together with developments in the surrounding urban heart of Singapore, Raffles Hotel is
a space of cultural disjuncture transfiguring through the three ages of capital. I argue that the
Hotel took the dominant form of white male domesticity in British Singapore, nostalgic authen-
ticity in the postcolonial period and cosmopolitan hybridity in the current global phase. In
each phase, the form elided the racial, class, gender and sexual contradictions of transnational
capital and produced social relations of relative mobility. It shows that the global city is not
made by transnational capital but by the developmental state harnessing economic flows for
global city-making with the ensuing spatial-cultural politics in tow.

KEY WORDS: Capitalism; development state; monument; hotels; Postcolonial; cultural form

Transfiguration and Monumentality in a Mobile City

Built in 1887, the famous Raffles Hotel of Singapore was, first, a manifestation of the
colonial domesticity of the British Empire, providing homely respite for white travelers.
It was and still is, second, a national monument of authentic history, legally inserted in
1987 into a postcolonial discourse that draws the equivalence between Stamford
Raffles’ establishment of Singapore as a colonial entrepôt and the Anglicized postco-
lonial ruling elite’s transformation of a wrecked post-War city into an export-oriented
industrialized city-state (Holden, 1999). It is, today, a monument to the neoliberal
globalization of Singapore, its branding globalized and transnationality branded in the
Raffles Hotels built in cities across Asia, America, Europe and the South Seas.

The Hotel is intricately bound to the transnational capitalism that Singapore has
been enmeshed in since the nineteenth century. But instead of seeing the Hotel as an

Correspondence Address: Daniel P.S. Goh, Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore,
AS1 #03-06, 11 Arts Link, Singapore, 117570. Email: socgohd@nus.edu.sg

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178 D. P. S. Goh

example of how Singapore has adapted itself to the changing vicissitudes of capital-
ism, successfully promoting itself as a global brand while conserving local heritage
and culture (Henderson, 2001), I want to discern, in this article, what the changing
monumentality of the Hotel can tell us about the culture of transnational capitalism
and, therefore, Singapore as a ‘mobile city’ traversed by the flows of capital embod-
ied in travelers, artifacts and cultural forms. In other words, instead of seeing
Singapore as a global city that, because of its dense transnational network linkages, is
able to affect economies, politics and cultures far beyond its shores, I take the position
of seeing Singapore and the Raffles Hotel as manifest forms emerging from and
shaped by the flows that pass through them and sustain their very existence.

For the cultural theorist, this project should evoke Marx’s (1976, pp. 163–77) theo-
rization of the commodity form as a fetishistic product of labor that takes on a life of
its own and enters into relationships with each other and with people, its seemingly
independent life and autonomous value thereby obscuring the social relations that
underlie its production and exchange. This fetishism reaches its zenith in capitalism
because the realm of exchange becomes dominant and pervades other realms, particu-
larly for Marx the realm of production in the very constitution of free wage labor, and
for our purposes here the realm of cultural forms, where culture is no longer tied to
localities but propelled into circulation carried by migrants, goods, images, technol-
ogy and ideas shot through with shifting disjuncture (Appadurai, 1990). Culture is not
incidental to the flow of capital embodied in these cultural forms but intrinsic to it;
capital cannot move without taking on explicit cultural forms. Thus, instead of treat-
ing capital as an instrumental and economically rational force that encroaches on local
culture and absorbs it to the modern form of abstract value, it is more appropriate that
we take transnational capitalism to be a system of cultural flows that possess local
things and spaces with its logic of split values (use and exchange values) and histori-
cal significations (signifiers and their meanings), thus transfiguring them to become
transcultural entities.

The concept ‘transfiguration’ points to the central problematic of moving beyond the
question of translatability (between values and significances) into the question of the
mutation of forms in the circulation of cultural flows in and across contiguous matrices
(Gaonkar & Povinelli, 2003). At stake here is our ability to imagine and understand an
accelerating mobility of cultural objects without reducing them to static moments of
gravitas. As a matter of analytical strategy, my focus is deliberately trained on what we
would expect to be a static moment of gravitas par excellence that is at the same time
inextricably connected to the logic of transnational capitalism in a city as pervaded by
global cultural flows as Singapore: a monument that is at the same time a commercial
tourist attraction. We expect monuments to be socially constructed as timeless repre-
sentations of a particular event or ethos of a period, the memory of which is to be
culturally constrained to fit the dominant political and economic agenda of the present.
Monuments are therefore supposed to be static and meaningful at any historical junc-
ture. Ostensibly, they stand, against the wear of social life and tear of historical change,
as a memorial testament to the immemorial. Can they be transfigured, or, are they and
have they been constantly transfiguring before our very eyes because the context is
itself shot through with shifting disjuncture arising from the flows of people, images,
ideas, capital and technology? How are the transfigurations linked to the mobilescapes
afflicting the social spaces of the city as it passes through the historical phases of

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Capital and the Transfiguring Monumentality of Raffles Hotel 179

cultural flows? What kind of derivative memories, histories, meaning-values, translat-
ability, authority and power are therefore produced?

I analyze the changing monumentality of Raffles Hotel briefly described in the
opening paragraph as moments of transfiguration, when the form of memorial
representation is manifested from the tussle between the mobilescapes of capitalism
and the social forces that seek to discipline and exploit them. Its transfiguration in
each of the three ages of capital was influenced by the relative juxtapositions of spati-
ality, authority and temporality expressed through the categories of race, gender, class
and sexuality that emerged from the tussle of the age. I argue that the Hotel took the
dominant cultural form of domesticity in British Singapore as it became a homely
symbol of safe haven for weary white colonial entrepreneurs, authenticity in the post-
colonial age of independence when it stood for the national accomplishments of the
developmental state in making over Singapore’s colonial origins, and hybridity in the
current global phase as state-owned capital grapples with the neoliberal order by
sending its assets into the cultural orbit of global commerce.

Imperial Capitalism and Colonial Domesticity

As the story goes, the Sarkies brothers, scions of Armenian traders and businessmen,
scouted for a good site to establish a hotel in Singapore and chanced upon a colonial
bungalow on the downtown beachfront owned by the Alsagoffs, prominent Arab trad-
ers and property owners. The bungalow was situated next to the Raffles Institution, a
premier English school established by Stamford Raffles for the enlightenment of the
native, which inspired the name of the newfound hotel. Raffles Hotel quickly became
one of the three premier hotels of British Southeast Asia operated by the Sarkies.

The Hotel’s founding upon a colonial bungalow signified an origin of colonial
domesticity. The colonial domestic space was a fragile space fraught with tensions.
The colonial bungalow was open to the native gaze and was therefore an additional site
for the performance of racial difference and imperial prestige. For the colonials under
the siege of alien cultures and climates, it was a refuge for the sustenance of metropol-
itan cultural identity. Colonial domestic space was paradoxically an anxious-comfort
zone in the contact zones of empire. On the one hand, the anxieties of colonial control
over the circuits of capital, natives and power were resolved in the controlled intimacy
of homely colonial comfort, where the white woman was the gentle mistress. On the
other hand, the inevitable presence of native servants in the bungalow needed to
maintain the homely comfort entailed an anxious policing of race, gender, class and
sexuality (Clancy-Smith & Gouda, 1998; Collingham, 2001; Stoler, 2002).

However, at Raffles Hotel, colonial domesticity is transfigured by the mobility of
its guests in the imperial capitalist networks beyond its doors. Raffles Hotel was not
the domestic space of the colonial settler or the elite colonial official, but the place of
refuge from imperial networks for the weary white entrepreneur and sojourner on the
high seas of commerce or exploration. Increasingly, as the plantations of Malaya took
off with the triumph of rubber, European planters from the domesticated interior
sought breaks from the rigors of extracting value from trees and coolies and swarmed
the Hotel with regularity. As a space of colonial domesticity for passing travelers, it
mirrored the ambivalence of anxiety and comfort in a different manner. It was an
invented space of timelessness that stood apart from both the colonial city and the

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180 D. P. S. Goh

native lands beyond. It was an androgynous space separated from the competition
between male bodies and the desires visited by female bodies, where the colonial
male can recharge himself for another foray into the imperial frontier.

The new building erected to replace the bungalow in 1897 exuded a simple French
Renaissance style of non-descript neoclassical columns, arches and ornaments melt-
ing idyllically into the stone façade of tall windows with wooden shutters and capped
with a tiled red roof. It signified androgynous timelessness out of place in a tropical
colony and standing apart from the statuesque and masculine neoclassical monumen-
tality of colonial public buildings a stone’s throw away. Its sister hotels signified
other temporalities. The masculine Strand in Rangoon mimicked grandiose, late-
Victorian neoclassical modernism in a conquered colony that boasted a competing
Theravada Buddhist civilization replete with its own monumental architectural
traditions. The hybrid Eastern in Penang stood miniature minarets on its French
Renaissance artifice and integrated an oriental dome of perfect symmetry into its
lobby, thus identifying with Penang’s status as the gateway to the peninsular Malay
states, which were celebrated as Islamic sultanates regenerated by British protection.
In contrast, and suited to Singapore, which had no interior and was thus not a gate-
way, but which was rather a cosmopolitan node that rose from the intersections of
imperial capitalism, Raffles Hotel appeared to be an architectural expansion of the
colonial bungalow, growing upwards and outwards to encompass, in the words of
explorer-author Carveth Wells, ‘an immense rambling structure, with huge court-
yards full of coconut palms and lovely tropical flowers’ that were surrounded by
‘tiers of wide verandahs on to which open lofty bedrooms, twice the height of any
ordinary hotel room’ (1994, p. 242).

The Hotel was marked by the domesticity visiting an old colonial bungalow. An
advertisement posted by the Sarkies in the Singapore Free Press in 1887 promised
‘every convenience and home comfort’ (cited in Sharp, 1981, p. 23). Arriving in
Singapore to enlist in the colonial service in 1890, Colonel R. V. K. Applin spent a
‘painful and sleepless night under a large mosquito curtain’ and tackled his bath ‘in a
dark place with a concrete floor, in the middle of which was a large earthenware jar
some four feet high’ (1994, p. 144). Though boasting of being the earliest hotel with
electric lighting and fans in the colony, the domesticity resisted modernity. Up to
1918, the large earthenware jar standing on a wooden grating remained the visitor’s
bath of scooping and pouring water over one’s head. It was only in the late 1930s that
Wells, on a return visit to Singapore, reported that the ‘artistic earthenware jar had
been replaced by an ugly galvanized iron tub underneath a brass tap’ (1994, p. 243).
In the mid-1920s, Horace Bleackley compared the ‘cool and airy’ Raffles with its
chief competitor, the Hotel de l’Europe, and found that the former must ‘give prece-
dence’ to the Europe, which was ‘a first-class hotel’ preferred by elite British travelers
and haughty British officials despite its ‘old-fashioned’ building that was ‘ill-suited to
the tropics’ (1994, p. 205). Raffles was left to the middling colonial classes: clerks,
writers, adventurers, junior bureaucrats, mid-rank military officers, planters, sailors
and the other foot soldiers of Western imperialism. A cast-iron portico was added to
the front porch facing Beach Road in 1913, but even this modern appendage was
domesticated by intricate Art Nouveau designs, its machined-edge construction soft-
ened by the curvilinear bending of metal characteristic of mass-produced middle-class
aesthetics of the age.

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Capital and the Transfiguring Monumentality of Raffles Hotel 181

The portico gave way in 1920 to a large rectangular marquee that doubled as dining
area in daylight and ballroom in the evenings. This was essentially a verandah that
protruded into the social space of the surroundings. King (1995, pp. 265–267)
discusses the verandah of the bungalow as a colonial space of leisure, where the white
colonial sitting in his rattan chair looking out into native society turned it into a
symbolic space of economic and political status. Studying the architecture of colonial
exhibitions, Morris (1983, pp. 45–46) describes the verandah that was commonly
grafted unto pavilions of tropical colonies as transition zones mediating the rigid
conventionality and propriety of colonial life and the exotic and sensuous native life
represented inside the pavilion’s galleries. Lai (2005, pp. 145–148) combines both
insights to analyze the courtyard verandah of the Malayan pavilion at the 1924 British
Empire Exhibition in Wembley as an imaginary zone of acclimatized domestic life,
where the fantasy of safety in a domesticated colony was experienced by white
visitors seated in rattan chairs observing natives and colonials interacting.

In Singapore, the verandah takes on an added political significance, as the municipal
authorities who sought ‘open, clearly visible, public spaces … essential to the policing
and surveillance functions of the colonial state’ (Yeoh, 2003, p. 246) battled the
complexity and versatility of multiple Asian usage of urban space centered on the
verandahs that extended over public walkways. In its daylight manifestation as dining
area, the extended verandah of Raffles Hotel took on this space of transition and polit-
icized domesticity. Here, the colonial could seek shelter from the seething life of the
Beach Road area, which popular British travel writer W. Robert Horan described as a
‘rabbit-warren of hovels, Chinese artisans’ shops and factories, movable open-air
restaurants, licensed opium-shops, pawnbrokers, second-hand clothes and junk dealers,
and the hordes of strange people who throng this evil-smelling artery of Singapore’
(1994, p. 222). The metonymy of strange businesses, commodity objects and exotic
natives highlight the Hotel’s surrounding social space as an ‘artery’ of the imperial
networks. This artery gave colonial significance to the Hotel’s domesticity. Sitting in
the extended verandah, the white colonial male could gaze safely at the sensual mani-
festations of the imperial networks traversing the public verandahs of the colonial city.

At night, when the extended verandah was turned into the ballroom, the gaze was
reversed. In the darkened streets, the natives now peered into the brightly lit marquee
and observed immaculately dressed colonials dancing with improbability. Bleackley
described the two ballrooms in Singapore, of the Raffles and Europe Hotels, as ‘a
scene of youth and beauty’, not only because the colony was largely peopled by
youth, but also because ‘when folks become elderly’ and stay on in the colony they
‘do not cumber the dancing-floor’ (1994, p. 207). On his stay in 1936, travel writer
H. D. Harben complained that the Hotel was ‘far from a pleasant place to stay in’
(1994, p. 232). A seasoned traveler traversing the imperial networks, his complaint
juxtaposed the colorful but noisy surrounding ‘artery’ with the discomforting domes-
ticity of colonials dancing ‘nearly every night till quite late’, of ‘the sound of feet on
the stone’ coming through ‘the trellis shutters’ as they walked about the modernity-
resistant Hotel because there were ‘no carpets and no windows’ (1994, p. 232). But if
the gazing native population found this a spectacle of eccentric decadence (Sharp,
1981, p. 41), the youthful colonials were dancing the night and their tropical anxieties
away to enact the transcolonial timelessness of Hotel and Empire. This timelessness
was asserted through to the last dance on the eve of the British surrender to Japanese

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182 D. P. S. Goh

invaders in February 1942, with, in the words of the fire service chief, ‘everyone
jampacked on the ballroom floor’ and jovially in denial of the ‘idea of a fall’ (quoted
in Sharp, 1981, pp. 52–53).

The Hotel celebrates Somerset Maugham for not only writing many of his popular
Malayan stories while staying at the Hotel in the 1920s, but also for collecting some
of the materials for his stories at the Hotel (Flower, 1986). By no coincidence,
Maugham begins many of his Malayan stories with a scene at the club or hotel. What
is significant is that transgressions and violence either follow the colonials as they
step out into the colonial spaces and imperial networks outside the hotel or enter the
safe and timeless space of the hotel as news, confessions and stories. Holden (1996,
p. 100) points out that Maugham’s Malayan stories are located in a colonial discourse
in which white women function as symbolic boundary markers in anxieties over
‘racial separation and sexual continence’. At the same time that white women were
brought to the colony to separate white men from enchanting native women, white
women must be protected from native male wiles. The domesticity of Raffles Hotel
was similarly gendered. The native staff mostly consisted of domesticated native
‘boys’ clad in hybrid Indian-Malay-European uniforms (Sharp, 1981, p. 87). Only a
handful of native women were employed and not as chambermaids or waitresses, a
gender preference that lasted till the 1960s (Pregarz, 1990, p. 21). On the dance-floor,
available white women were in short supply, and the social interaction of white
women visiting the Hotel without their husbands was regulated by gossips (Sharp,
1981, pp. 41–42). In contrast to the feminine domesticity of the colonial bungalow,
the domesticity of the Hotel was an androgynous domesticity where sexuality was
occluded and white women functioned as the boundary to the imperial mores out
there so that masculinity could recover its bearings.

From Decolonization to the Developmental State

In the post-War twilight of Empire, the timelessness of the Hotel decayed as the
historical forces of nationalism and socialism disrupted the mobilities of capital.
Commandeered by the Japanese as an elite guesthouse and then by the British military
as the same, by the time it was returned to civilian oversight, the politics of decoloni-
zation affected the Hotel. In the 1950s, conservative Anglicized Chinese businessmen
were introduced to the board. Tan Chin Tuan, active in the pro-colonial Progressive
Party, became the board’s chairman in the late-1950s. Perceived as a colonial relic,
the Hotel had a prickly relationship with autonomous transitional governments led by
nationalists, leading Tan to proclaim, ‘one oftentimes wonders whether the authorities
are sincerely trying to develop the tourist industry’ (Raffles Hotel Annual Report
1958, hereafter RHAR). The Hotel attempted to adapt to the political realities by
Malayanizing its identity and activities. Traditional Malay dances were introduced in
the ‘Malayan Night’ floorshows in 1956 (Sharp, 1981, p. 75). A souvenir scarf of the
period shows the semiotic association of the Hotel with Malay icons, including a
kampong house, a couple in Malay dress and coconut trees (Flower, 1986, p. 44).
Beneath the image of rustic native tranquility, the local workforce was a thorn in the
Hotel’s side. Radical labor unions, an integral part of the anti-colonial movement, led
the local workers in skirmishes with the Hotel management from the five-day hotel
strike in 1955 to the mass labor strike in 1963. Significantly, during Maugham’s last

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Capital and the Transfiguring Monumentality of Raffles Hotel 183

stay in the Hotel in 1959, he reportedly said, ‘The Raffles I knew then was nothing
like it is today’, and, ‘The East is a very different world from the one I knew’ (quoted
in Sharp, 1981, p. 106).

Indeed it was. The networks of production and trade upon which colonial empires
were constructed had transformed into postcolonial networks managed and harnessed
by sovereign national states for their developmental programs. The political dimension
of the networks was disciplined by authoritarian regimes split along communist, non-
communist and anti-communist lines. Anti-communist, authoritarian developmental-
ism was the order of the day in Singapore. This solved the labor problems and the
relationship between Hotel and government improved, but not unequivocally. In 1968,
the Hotel management assisted the developmental state in setting up the Hotel and
Catering Centre to help train hotel staff required for the expansion of the tourist and
hotel industry, but expressed ‘doubt as to whether the pace of development [was] not
too fast’ (RHAR, 1968 ). As the Singapore economy rapidly developed, competition
became intense. The Hotel was losing both well-trained staff and high-paying guests
to new modern luxury hotels (RHAR, 1971 ) and experienced losses to its balance
books for the first time in the 1970s (RHAR, 1973 & 1975 ). The Hotel struggled with
rising costs and low room rates despite the fact that the number of tourist visiting
Singapore grew more than four times from 579,284 in 1970 to 2,562,085 in 1980
(Singapore Government, 2000, p. 24). The Silver Kris, Singapore Airlines’ in-flight
magazine, described the Hotel in 1978 as ‘a pale relic from a bygone era’, where ‘the
curious, the nostalgic’ stopped by ‘to look at the remains of a legend’ (Hutton, 1978,
p. 31).

But by all indications, the Hotel was holding on to its staple coterie of middle-class
travelers who sought an ‘authentic’ experience of Singapore as part of the exotic ex-
colonial East. At the beginning of the decade the management was ‘encouraged by the
continuing support of discriminating visitors who require their hotel to be part of
Singapore rather than the stereotyped accommodation which the new hotels provide’
(RHAR, 1971 ). At the end of the decade the management was pleased that the Hotel
continued ‘to be very popular with visitors to Singapore’ but sounded the warning that
continuously rising costs threatened its profitability (RHAR, 1980 ). The Hotel’s
middle-class guest list could no longer support the costs of timeless domesticity. The
Hotel needed a makeover that would attract high-heeled guests and, at the same time,
enhance its authenticity to match the transnational capitalism of the age.

Up to this point, the developmental state was still focused on primary industrializa-
tion and the promotion of tourism and heritage was still a secondary and piecemeal
affair. This quickly changed at the end of the 1970s after successful industrialization.
However, the development of tourism had to be reconciled with urban heritage
conservation. In 1979, the Development Bank of Singapore, a state-owned bank and
the owner of the land on which the Hotel stands indicated that it might be entering
into a joint venture with the Overseas Chinese Banking Corporation, the holder of the
Hotel’s land lease and a major shareholder in the Development Bank’s proposed adja-
cent Raffles City development. The intention was to modernize and rationalize the
Raffles Hotel with the new development (Business Times [BT], 1979). Failing which,
the banks were keen to preserve the Hotel in its current state and let global hotel
chains run it to profitability (Straits Times [ST], 1980a). Heritage conservation did not
figure in the banks’ plans. On the other hand, the government and its Singapore

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184 D. P. S. Goh

Tourist Promotion Board were keen to preserve and enlarge the Hotel by developing
adjacent land behind the Hotel (Asia Wall Street Journal, 1980; ST, 1980b). In addi-
tion, the government pushed a plan for extensive renovation of the Hotel, to restore it
‘to its former elegance and maximize its historical value’ and demolish parts ‘not
considered architecturally worth preserving’ and ‘of no historical importance’ (ST
1980b; Singapore Monitor, 1982).

The uncertainty remained but there was little local public interest. Unlike the rede-
velopment of other historic landmarks like the National Theater, which sparked
public protests, the population was apathetic about the Hotel. Its fate lied in the over-
lapping rationalities of finance capital and the developmental state, with the former
interested in the profitability of investment and the latter concerned about reconciling
heritage with tourist development. Discussions about the redevelopment carried on
into the mid-1980s with little progress until they were finally abandoned in 1985
(RHAR, 1983, 1984, 1985 ). The government finally threw down the gauntlet. Releas-
ing its Tourism Product Development Plan, the government announced that it wanted
the Hotel to be turned into a suites-only hotel reserved for state guests and other elite
visitors and threatened to take the lead in redevelopment if it failed to persuade the
two banks (ST, 1986; BT, 1986). The Hotel became part of the developmental state’s
grand plan to remodel the old city centre to promote tourism, by preserving heritage
buildings while renovating them for modern commercial uses.

In 1987, the state moved to force the fate of the Hotel. First, the Hotel was named a
national monument and placed under the legal protection of the Preservation of
Monuments Board. Second, the government put out the lease of the adjacent land for
public tender, to be sold to the party with the best development plan, therefore effec-
tively imposing its redevelopment design plan on the Hotel (ST, 1987b). Of the nine
proposals submitted for the tender, the proposal with the lowest bid by the two banks
won the tender because, the government announced, the design closely followed ‘the
architectural style and intensity of use of Raffles Hotel’ (BT, 1988b), which the banks
had earlier announced that they were committed to restore to its ‘colonial splendour’
(BT, 1988a). Even then, the final renovation plan was delayed because of ‘the keen
interest which various bodies are taking in the project’ (RHAR, 1988). The Hotel
finally closed in March 1989 for renovations.

Developmentalism, Nostalgia and Authenticity

Through this period of decay and uncertainty as the networks of capital adapted to the
sovereignty of nation states, the domesticity of the Hotel transfigured into a space of
nostalgia and authenticity shared by expatriates, local business and governmental
elites and state agencies, all groups that were closely associated with the new
networks of capital. The Hotel became a space for reflection on the legacies of
colonialism and the politics of postcolonial identity and authenticity, its monumental
timelessness became a question of its temporal location between past and present as a
national monument. But at the same time, the Hotel was a space pervaded by the
emerging transnational networks of capital, which were beginning to make their
effects felt in Singapore as the developmental state prepared the spatial infrastructure
to engage and harness the networks for sustained economic development after
successful primary industrialization. The temporal location of the Hotel between past

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Capital and the Transfiguring Monumentality of Raffles Hotel 185

and present became a question of whether the past may be preserved profitably in a
globalizing world, whether nostalgia can be a commodity.

At the height of the uncertainties caused by state intervention in the 1980s, some 10
books were published on the Hotel, from British-born Ilsa Sharp’s tone-setting There
is Only One Raffles to American-born Gretchen Liu’s Raffles Hotel. The latter was
the curator of the Raffles Hotel Museum and the wife of architect and urban planner,
Liu Thai Ker, who headed the committee that picked the winning redevelopment
design for the 1988 tender. In these books, legends, stories, myths, memories, photo-
graphs, old and new, and personal experiences were intertwined with historical facts.
The Hotel published a few of these, and 50,000 copies of these books were reportedly
sold between 1984 and 1989, at the height of the uncertainty over the Hotel’s fate, in
the Hotel alone (Pregarz, 1990, p. 10). The authors represented an emerging stratum
of transnational elites living and working in Singapore, who could harness the
symbolic means to prove to the government elites, in the words of one regular guest-
turned-author, Raymond Flower, in his foreword to former manager Roberto
Pregarz’s book, ‘how profitable nostalgia can be’ (1990, p. 8). An Austrian author and
his Singaporean co-writer, while doing research on their Raffles Hotel book in 1987,
found the ‘priceless original building plans’ of 1897, the discovery of which Sharp
wrote in an article in the daily, Straits Times, would accelerate ‘the impetus for resto-
ration’ (ST, 1987a).

Renovation followed the principle of profitable nostalgic authenticity advocated by
the transnational elites. The Hotel insisted it was ‘restoration’ rather than renovation,
with the question being one ‘of bringing back the past to sell it in the future’ (BT, 1989).
According to the plan, the Hotel returned to its original six social and business outlets,
the Raffles Grill, Writers’ Bar, Tiffin Room, Palm Court, Bar and Billiard Room, and
the Lobby, though the location of each was moved and they were extensively renovated
to reflect the mood and character of each outlet. For instances, the Writer’s Bar received
a wall of first-edition works by famous writers connected to the Hotel, the imperious
Raffles Grill displayed Chippendale furniture, period landscape paintings and silver-
ware, and the Bar and Billiard Room reflected the ‘chauvinism of the 20s’ with its
‘masculine teak furniture and rugged flooring’ (BT, 1989). Here, authenticity was not
about the reality of the past or the actuality of physical manifestation, but the accentu-
ation of the essence of a particular place that was nostalgically represented rather than
historically appraised. Relic silverware and chinaware found in the storerooms during
restoration were themselves restored for use by guests, in accordance with ‘the hotel’s
theme to recapture the atmosphere of the 1920s…to enhance the nostalgic 1920s feel-
ings’ (ST, 1989b). Even the uniforms of the employees were modeled on the principle,
with the staff of each outlet having its own unique uniform to capture its nostalgic
essence. For examples, the Bar and Billiard Room staff wore period clothes that
mimicked colonial wear in the 1920s, with women in long flowing skirts and fluffy
cotton tops and men in tuxedo-vests and bowtie, while the Tiffin Room staff wore
Asian-collar jackets, a cross between the Mao and Nehru suits, and batik sarongs for
the females to serve local delicacies and curries. Sikhs, an ethnic group traditionally
employed in the colonial security forces, were employed as doormen.

But if the authentic 1920s was the vantage point for the nostalgia of the inner social
space of the Hotel, the planners set 1915 as the benchmark year for the authenticity of
the original architecture (Urban Redevelopment Authority and Preservation of

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186 D. P. S. Goh

Monuments Board [URA & PMB], 1997, p. 9). A set of six postcards on sale at the
Hotel, reproduced from original drawings in the Hotel’s collection, presents the narra-
tive, from a view of the main building in 1900, the two views of the Bar and Billiard
Room, before and after its 1907 renovation, the Bras Basah Wing opened in 1904, the
cast-iron portico built in 1913, to the last overview of the Hotel astride the artery of
the transcolonial networks, with the caption, ‘By 1915 all of the hotel’s historic build-
ings were in place’ . As a result of this historicization, the ballroom at the front of the
Hotel, which represented the nostalgic 1920s more than any other place in Singapore,
was demolished and the intricate cast-iron portico the ballroom had replaced restored
to serve as the grand entrance to the Hotel, as can be seen in Figure 1. An unaware
Hotel spokesman remarked, ‘It was at this portico that the beaux of the day dallied
with romantic intent as young ladies arrived in their finery to dance the night away’
(ST, 1990). The Hotel went to great lengths to research the portico, visiting archives
in Singapore and Glasgow and the original Scottish company that made the portico,
so that an American foundry could reproduce the portico as accurately as possible
(ST, 1991).
Figure 1. The main entrance of the Raffles Hotel, with the cast-iron portico greeting and sheltering guests alighting from vehicles.

Why was the portico so fetishized by the urban planners and restoration architects?
Why did they opt for the portico over the ballroom? At the heart of the question here
was anxiety with the authenticity of the Hotel in representing the nation. Many locals
dismissed the Hotel as a colonial hangover and a symbol of European elitism and
prejudice. The government-led restoration of the Hotel into a world-class hotel for the

Figure 1. The main entrance of the Raffles Hotel, with the cast-iron portico greeting and 
sheltering guests alighting from vehicles.

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Capital and the Transfiguring Monumentality of Raffles Hotel 187

global jetsetters added fuel to the fire. The restoration of the cast-iron portico repre-
sented two complementary re-inscriptions of historical memory that resolved this crit-
icism. First, the European heritage was cleansed of its decadence and remembered for
its benevolence. In the preservation guidelines, the URA and PMB describe the Hotel
as reflecting ‘the European roots of the social and cultural development of the coun-
try’ and testifying to ‘the aspirations of Singapore’s multi-racial population’ (1997,
pp. 2–3). But the inherent contradiction in this view is that the roots are colonial, in
which racial discrimination was the rule rather than exception. Thus, in the guide-
lines, the Europeans are remembered instead as ‘a small, friendly and hospitable
community in the cosmopolitan society in Singapore often interacting freely with
their Asian counterparts’ (URA & PMB, 1997, p. 13). Historical amnesia went hand
in hand with the demolition of the ballroom, the symbol of European decadence, prej-
udice and denial, and colonial domesticity was re-written as nostalgia for a cosmopol-
itan age of authentic relations between Europeans and Asian. In establishing the Hotel
as national monument, the developmental state adopted the narratives of the transna-
tional elites published in the 1980s and 1990s, eliding the racial, gender and class
divisions of the past so that present divisions could be disciplined. Considered
together with the conservation of Chinatown, Kampong Glam and Little India as tour-
ist attraction and national heritage sites in the same period (Kong & Yeoh, 2003),
Raffles Hotel formed the ‘Others’ component, often represented by Eurasians, in the
monumentalizing of the state’s official Chinese-Malay-Indian-Others multiracialism.

The cast-iron portico, an artifact of the Art Nouveau aesthetics of industrialization,
or as acknowledged in the preservation guidelines, ‘an influence of the Victorian
industrial movement’ (URA & PMB, 1997, p. 18), represented instead the meeting
point of European and Asian aspirations, linking the developmental state’s economic
programs of industrialization with the Victorian industrialization that built Singapore
and an Empire based on trade. Thus, the pro-government Straits Times wrote in
response to criticisms of the restoration, that ‘Raffles should not be looked at in isola-
tion’, but as ‘part of a bigger complex of historic buildings that grew with Singapore’,
with the buildings blending ‘into a charming colonial era look which over the years
has taken on a distinctive Singaporean personality’ (ST, 1989a). This was the spatial
component of the utopian Singapore Story being invented in this period: successful
national development on British colonial legacies, in which racial, class and gender
divisions were overcome to realize the authentic cosmopolitan city that Singapore had
always been in essence. With the portico, sojourners of the emergent transnational
networks disappeared into the Hotel. There was no longer any outward verandah
gazing at scurrying natives in daylight, nor the reversed gaze at performances of time-
lessness at nighttime, but an impervious cast-iron barrier of postcolonial authenticity
and profitable nostalgia exuding the state-led Asianization of European industry.

Millennial Capitalism, Cosmopolitanism and Hybridity

The renovated Hotel and its adjoining new development, called the Raffles Hotel
Arcade, opened in late 1991. The re-opening poster is an exercise in minimalist graph-
ics showing the rooftop of the Hotel’s distinctive front façade on a backdrop of a dark
blue sky that occupied most of the poster. The words ‘Today at 10 a.m. a little bit of
history will be made at the corner of Bras Basah and Beach Roads’ hovered above the

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188 D. P. S. Goh

Hotel at the center of the poster. An emphatic ‘The Legend Resumes’ at the bottom of
the poster heralds the reopening. But its simplicity says a lot about the Hotel’s coming
transfiguration, prophesying that the continuation of the legend would see the Hotel
transcending the very domesticity and nostalgic authenticity it is grounded in. The
mobilities of capitalism have shifted from the imperialist control and nationalist devel-
opmental harnessing of capital circuits in the earlier two eras to accelerated capital and
commodity flows in a new transnational market order. In the subsequent decade and a
half, the story still running as this article is written, the Hotel transfigured into a magical
space of ‘millennial capitalism’, which the Comaroff and Comaroff describe as ‘a capi-
talism that presents itself as a gospel of salvation’, ‘that if rightly harnessed, is invested
with the capacity wholly to transform the universe of the marginalized and disempow-
ered’ (2000, p. 292). In the same year as the Hotel reopening, the Singapore develop-
mental state launched its strategic plan to harness millennial capitalism to become ‘a
developed country in the first league’ in three to four decades, with ‘economic dyna-
mism, a high quality of life, a strong national identity and the configuration of a global
city’ as the main targets (Singapore Ministry of Trade & Industry, 1991, p. 2).

As the Comaroffs (2000, p. 305) point out, neoliberal globalization intensifies ‘the
abstractions inherent in capitalism itself’, alienating labor from its human context,
substituting society with the market and building a cosmopolis of ‘aggregated transac-
tions’. In the context of our discussion, the city space that Raffles Hotel is situated in
has been transformed into a flow of consumption between the vernacular and the
cosmopolitan, in which citizens are called to have a taste of the capitalist paradise of
perpetual shopping, eating and drinking. The civilization of commodities forms a trian-
gle around Raffles Hotel. To the west and south stand the hypermodern Raffles and
Suntec Cities, with their international convention centers, towering world-class hotels
and high-end shopping malls. The civic cultural district spreads out to the north,
consisting of conserved and new buildings housing museums, libraries, a business
university, drama centers and art schools. To the east is found the former artery of the
imperial networks, the area around Bras Basah and Bugis roads, now remade into the
vernacular of repackaged old trades, street food and nightlife, or, as the Prime Minister
describes, ‘It’s something new and exciting but also something old and nostalgic about
Bras Basah, Bugis’ (ST, 2005). The symbolic axis of the space balances between the
cosmopolitan elite and the vernacular masses, with the commodified cultural produc-
tion organized by the developmental state as mediation. The Singapore Tourism Board
thus produces ‘Uniquely Singapore’ as ‘an overarching brand’ that ‘captures our mix
of cultures and languages, our history and traditions, our cosmopolitan society and
heartland living’. Government officials cite Singapore’s hawker food centers and the
Hotel as icons of the vernacular and the cosmopolitan (ST, 2004).

But Raffles Hotel is not merely or wholly an elite cosmopolitan space. Rather, in its
transfiguration in the new transnational networks of capital, the Hotel is a space that
contained and ordered the triangle of cosmopolitanism, the vernacular and commodi-
fied cultural production. The Hotel is a space of hybridity containing these sometimes
contradictory multiplicities. The restored old portion of the Hotel is the space of
cosmopolitan elitism, closed off to the common public and increasingly frequented by
the very important and the famous. In this space, the cosmopolitan-vernacular
hybridities of globalization are celebrated. Behind the cast-iron portico, their racial,
gender, class and power conjunctions and disjuncture are safely shielded from the

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Capital and the Transfiguring Monumentality of Raffles Hotel 189

critical gaze of the masses. At the Hotel in 2006, Queen Elizabeth II awarded a
Singaporean membership in the Order of British Empire during her state visit for his
work in developing youth ‘self-reliance, perseverance and a sense of responsibility
through expeditions, community service, skills development and physical recreation’
(ST, 2006a). The postcolonial irony lies in a white female monarch rewarding a
middle-class Chinese male citizen of a former colony of her state a colonial medal for
promoting what are, in fact, the values of rugged and disciplined capitalist-gentleman
masculinity similar to her country’s Victorian tradition during its imperial heyday.

Popular criticisms of the race-gender-class vectors of cosmopolitanism in the
intimacy between Caucasian expatriates and local women are neutralized by the
mainstream press in the symbolic space of Raffles Hotel. Its executive assistant
manager, a Nigerian-born Singaporean Indian, was celebrated in 2003 for his engage-
ment to a Brazilian-Czech hotelier. The Straits Times characterizes this as part of the
Reverse Pinkerton Coupling trend of white woman who ‘embraces all things Asian,
including the men’, marrying Asian man who is ‘a confident global nomad, unafraid
of the expressive Caucasian woman’ (ST, 2003b). In relation to Maugham’s gendered
tropes, the dangerous femininity of the white woman and the dangerous masculinity
of the Asian man are serially combined here to create a pairing to offset the postcolo-
nial anxiety of rich white men seducing and running off with naïve native women,
which is itself symbolic of the fear of Western neo-imperialist capitalist exploitation.
But in relation to the opposition of cosmopolitan and vernacular in neoliberal
discourse, all danger is erased in the reverse coupling, with the couples exemplifying
social, cultural and physical mobility, demonstrating the possibility of being both
cosmopolitan and vernacular, being ‘global in their outlook’ but ‘as Singaporean as
they come’ in their ‘day-to-day lives’ (ST, 2003b).

The new Arcade extension is the primary meeting point between cosmopolitan and
vernacular in the Hotel space, where visitors could walk in from the streets and move
around freely. Here the differences of past and present, East and West, cosmopolitan
and vernacular are commodified and erased in the hedonistic fantasy of mobility and
hybridity. The Hotel’s reopening press release announces that it ‘has carefully
balanced the best of East and West by juxtapositioning high fashion, exclusive jewel-
lery, watches and luxury leather goods with an array of Asia’s finest craftsmanship
including Chinese and Thai silk, cloissoneware, carpets, pewter and antiques’
(Raffles Hotel, 1991). A visitor entering the Arcade’s main entrance facing the Bras
Basah-Bugis area would encounter some of these commodities displayed in museum
cases not unlike the nostalgic displays of authentic artifacts in the Raffles Hotel
Museum on the upper floor of the Arcade.

A Victorian-style theater in the Arcade provided entertainment, while a range of
outlets served food and drinks exuding global hybridity, including the Empire Café, ‘a
typical 1920s Singapore coffee house’, Seah Street Deli, ‘a typical New York-style
delicatessen’, Doc Cheng’s, a restaurant serving ‘Western cuisine created with an
Asian twist’, the Royal China, ‘a top international Chinese restaurant operator based
in London’, and Ah Teng’s, a bakery serving ‘delicious pastries, biscuits and cakes, as
well as steaming hot dim sum’ (Raffles Hotel, 2007). Inside the Arcade, the old
colonial domesticity can be experienced in a hybrid form at the Raffles Courtyard,
shown in Figure 2, described by the Hotel as ‘a timeless structure with white arches
flanked by tropical palms and native plants’, its ‘colonial cocktail bar’ and ‘traditional

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190 D. P. S. Goh

Figure 2. The colonial-themed Raffles Courtyard that is open to the public for food and 
drinks, with the skyscrapers of Raffles City in the background. A replica of the cast-iron 

portico can be seen at the far end of the Courtyard.

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Capital and the Transfiguring Monumentality of Raffles Hotel 191

alfresco kitchen’, which serves Asian seafood, making it ‘a pleasant place for patrons
to watch the passing parade of visitors’ (Raffles Hotel, 2007). To complete the experi-
ence of gazing, the towering presence of the hotel and office buildings of Raffles City
in the background returns the gaze of the transnational networks, albeit in an abstract
and benevolent way unlike the malevolent gaze of the native into the old extended
verandah, with the Courtyard customer experiencing imaginary transnational elites
peering down on them through mirrored windows as they eat and chatter the night
away in the new fantastic timelessness of millennial capitalism.
Figure 2. The colonial-themed Raffles Courtyard that is open to the public for food and drinks, with the skyscrapers of Raffles City in the background. A replica of the cast-iron portico can be seen at the far end of the Courtyard.

Outside Ah Teng’s Bakery, where the Hotel structure covers the street pavement
and turns it into a verandah, the hybridity is reversed. Figure 3 shows the verandah.
Located at the junction between the cosmopolitan west, the civic-cultural north and
the vernacular east, passersby are enticed to grab a bite under the shade of the Hotel’s
street verandah, sit at the traditional marble-top tables of old Asian coffeeshops and
gaze at the flow of people going about their business in the civilization of commodi-
ties. The Hotel becomes a monument of serial hybrid imaginations, that is, in the
‘bound seriality’ Anderson (1998, pp. 29–45) discusses as global imaginations of
similarity and difference running through bounded and essentialist categories. The
significances of race, gender, class and sexuality are reversed, recombined and played
around in simulations of signs, but the categories and their essentialisms remain
intact. It becomes neither a monument for the colonial elites nor the nation but the
postcolonial elites participating in the transnational networks of neoliberal capital. As

Figure 3. The vernacular street verandah turned nostalgic cosmopolitan sidewalk complete 
with old Chinese coffee-shop tables outside Ah Teng’s Bakery.

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192 D. P. S. Goh

the Straits Times comments, the images of empire at the Arcade ‘invite us, the once
colonized, to occupy the position, if only imaginatively, of the colonizers’, with the
‘English-educated, in particular, succumb[ing] to the temptation’ (ST, 2003a). It is a
monument that gestures to the vernacular, but only to draw the vernacular into
cosmopolitanism and transform it into cultural commodities to defuse the criticality of
postcolonialism.
Figure 3. The vernacular street verandah turned nostalgic cosmopolitan sidewalk complete with old Chinese coffee-shop tables outside Ah Teng’s Bakery.

The selling of hybridity and mobility is not limited to the Hotel’s Singapore space.
Raffles International was formed in 1989 to ride the waves of globalization and plant
its brand of utopian hybridity in other parts of the world. Today, the group operates
Raffles hotels in Europe, the United States and Asia. The Raffles Beijing Hotel, a joint
venture with the Beijing Tourism Group, opened in 2006 following the formula of
serial hybridity fusing historical and present, Western and Eastern significances. The
Hotel occupied a historic wing of the Le Grand Hotel de Peking, ‘where dignitaries
such as Chinese revolutionary leader Sun Yat Sen and French general Charles de
Gaulle once hobnobbed’ (ST, 2006b). Refurbished ‘in a mix of French colonial and
Oriental styles’ (ST, 2006b), Raffles Beijing celebrates the dramatic rise of contempo-
rary China, with a touch of French anti-Americanism, and defuses its terrifying impli-
cations, which Napoleon predicted if the sleeping giant should awake. Shaped as a
pyramid and housing a tropical garden modeled after Singapore’s famous Botanic
Gardens, Raffles Dubai, a joint venture with a member of the emirate’s ruling family,
opened in 2008 to the fanfare of a Chinese lion dance. It is not the Raffles brand per se
that makes the successful globalization of the Hotel possible, but this formulaic
hybridity that makes it a successful global brand.

As such, Raffles Hotel is no longer about the cultural production of a commodity
space, but a cultural product in its own right. Thus, there was a hardly a protest when
the national monument was sold along with Raffles International for a big windfall to
local capital, both state-owned and privately held, to American global investment
company Colony Capital and Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal’s Kingdom Holding in
2005. Nothing was or can be substantially changed, since the law protects the Hotel as
a heritage site. In any case, the new owners are interested in the global brand name
rather than the Hotel per se, and plans for expansion to global cities in the Gulf king-
doms, Canada and the United States are afoot. The international Raffles chain remains
under Singaporean management, thus indicating that the sale is a strategic move to
foster transnational elite connections that would place Singapore as a key node in the
booming tourist industry stretching from the Middle East to East Asia and North
America. This is the very logic of Singapore’s globalization as it partakes of the
neoliberal order of regulated free markets and constitutional politics, in which it
builds its own commercial empire through alliances and stakeholder relations with
both established Western capital and emerging Asian capital by touting the very brand
of Singapore. State-led capital brands and sells Singapore as a unique global city with
its utopian hybridity that promises to break down the divisions of East and West and
pacify the age-old racial, class and gender divisions of capitalism.

Conclusion

Monuments express power. Some monuments express this in an explicit and epic
way, like the Stalinist statue, the Lincoln Memorial or the Arc de Triomphe, their

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Capital and the Transfiguring Monumentality of Raffles Hotel 193

semantics and psychic resonance clearly evident in their directly interpolating form.
Others are more subtle, like the Vietnam War Memorial or Singapore’s Civilian
War Memorial, which is a towering four-pillar structure symbolizing the country’s
four major races and located across from Raffles Hotel. Neither epical nor subtle,
monuments to capital like the Raffles Hotel are insidious in their expression of
power, because they transfigure according to the changing commodity logic of capi-
talism. Their transfigurations, resonating with the capitalist logic of the era and the
subjects capital produces, prevent them from becoming fossilized into the merely
ideological or becoming political sites of discursive struggle. They function in the
reproduction of elite subjectivities and the needs and desires of these subjectivities
in the different ages of capital. As I have shown, the Raffles Hotel transfigured
from a manifestation of colonial domesticity in the colonial age, to one of nostalgic
authenticity in the national period, and to a monument of cultural hybridity in the
transnational age.

As monuments to capital, hotels give us access into the secret symbolic processes
of the rapidly changing mobile city. Transnational capital flows can be indexed by
numerical figures, but we need to see how these flows, carried in commodities,
cultural images and tourists, physically and symbolically transform the city as they
traverse and circulate through its streets. They also transform state and society as state
actors and other social agents attempt to control, harness and facilitate the flows
through spatial production. In the process, race, class, gender and sexuality are medi-
ated through each other, so that the ruling elites of the age can manage these social
categories through the changing spatiality of the mobile city. Hotels, particularly heri-
tage hotels, as icons of urbanity and mobility occupy a key place in the process. The
hotel space is not so much the space of historical erasure or modern abstraction as the
space of formal management and manipulation of cultural signs and significance, that
is, in the case of Raffles Hotel, the manipulation of racial, gender, class and sexual
meanings through the forms of domesticity, authenticity and hybridity that are
manifested in the architecture of the Hotel. Therefore, by digging into the layers of
changes to the Hotel’s architectural space, we can see the otherwise ephemeral
cultural manifestations of capital flows and the ensuing cultural politics that shape
state and society in different eras.

This is a cultural archaeology of capitalism as well as an urban sociology of spatial-
cultural politics. It shows the mobile city to be socially stratified, such that the varying
mobility of segments of the population as it is shaped by the urban architecture corre-
sponds to the opportunities for their social mobility. We find thus the Raffles Hotel
opened and closed to specific groups of people through the ages of capital, from the
Hotel as a place of white refuge amidst bustling native streets during the colonial era
to the struggles over control of the space by unions, the local bourgeoisie and the state
in the postcolonial era. Today, the Hotel space is an intricate complex of public access
and restriction that manage the pedestrian and consumer traffic through its courtyards,
arcades and verandahs and define the cosmopolitan elite hosted in its exclusive inner
sanctum against the mobile masses coursing through the city outside. The process is
dialectical and complex and shows that the global city is not made by transnational
capitalist forces but, in the Singapore case, by the developmental state harnessing and
facilitating capital flows for global city-making with the ensuing spatial-cultural
politics of mobility in tow. Wharton’s (2001) analysis of Hilton hotels as artifacts of

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194 D. P. S. Goh

globalizing Americanism during the Cold War suggests that features of the Raffles
Hotel transfiguration are seen in global hotel chains. The building of Raffles Hotels
throughout globalizing Asia with its Singapore branding and utopian hybridity
suggests a new age of Asian capitalism is upon us, in which developmental city-states
play a central role in actively making mobile cities.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Natalie Oswin, Brenda Yeoh, Philip Holden, Chua Beng Huat, Elaine
Ho, Kelvin Low and the reviewers and editor of Mobilities for their critical
comments.

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