© Patrik Bingham-Hall
The tropical, green, and populous city-state of Singapore has gone from being a small developing country to one of the world’s most modern cities in only 55 years. With its colonial history as a bustling port and transfer hub for goods from all over the world, Singapore has been a cultural melting pot for centuries. In the early 1960s, most people were living in cramped and unhygienic slums along the Singapore River or in the kampungs, as villages are called in Malay.