Raffles Hotel evokes colonial era

‘‘The hotel is nothing more than a kitschy icon of Singapore’s colonial past,’’ said Cyril Wong, a Singaporean poet. ‘‘Its romantic surroundings are no longer relevant to today’s writers who wish to be inspired by contemporary issues,’’ he said.

Some think the 118-year-old hotel, which was sold this week to US-based Colony Capital, is just another self-important colonial structure of the past.

‘‘It started off as a colonial enterprise and is now another foreign enterprise,’’ said Yasmine Yahya, researcher for the Economist Group.

‘‘There has never been anything particularly Singapore an about the Raffles Hotel identity. Now that it has been sold to Westerners, I guess the Raffles Hotel story has come full circle,’’ she said.

The hotel, formerly an Arab merchant’s bungalow, was opened by Armenian hoteliers in 1887. In 1933, after the death of its last Armenian owner, Raffles Hotel was made a public company called Raffles Hotel Ltd.

But many of today’s writers and artists would rather draw inspiration from buildings being torn down than from the old colonial landmark itself, Singapore poet Wong said. ‘‘If there’s a writer who gets his inspiration from Raffles Hotel today, I’d tell him ‘Go to Little India — talk about the real thing’,’’ 28-year-old Wong said.

Little India is one of Singapore’s ethnic enclaves which has managed to resist much of the urbanisation that has overtaken the area around Raffles.

Tony Watts, Editor of a magazine for expatriates, believes the hotel’s former reputation as a writers’ haunt may have been a bit overblown. ‘‘It was probably not the hotel which inspired writers at the time but the tropical, undeveloped surroundings of Southeast Asia,’’ said Watts, an expatriate of eight years. — Reuters