imperialism my 100 year old guy book will  leave me on a railway adventure through  

archipelagos and peninsulas dotted  with hills forests and paddy fields  

i'll tour towering mega cities and magnificent  mosques i'll encounter golden buddhas and jewelled  

temples and experience some of the world's most  spectacular and notorious railways as i travel  

through the diverse nations of this vast region  i'll learn how they asserted their independence  

against the british french and dutch empires to  become the economic tigers and dragons of today

my two and a half thousand mile journey  through southeast asia concludes in singapore  

the only sovereign island city-state once  britain's most successful colonial invention  

and today one of the world's  most prosperous countries

i began in the central business district  before exploring the port of tuas  

the historic neighborhood  of chinatown and marina bay  

on this leg i'll travel to the district of  little india and visit the southern island of  

sentosa before returning to the city centre and  boat key on my travels i'll explore the world's  

biggest subterranean train depot this looks  like an underground city of skyscrapers enjoy  

the latest developments in urban farming  here's to singapore's food self-sufficiency  

relationship and revisit one of britain's most  humiliating military defeats they were very very  

experienced in jungle warfare people were called  unawares and so the city fell in just one week

please do not mean against this morning i'm  heading six miles northeast of the center  

to the district of taisen i want to get the  inside track on the train network that's  

carried me around the island the singapore  mass rapid transit is a very extensive system  

i was astonished to discover that it began  operations only in 1987 that's more than 120  

years later the my city london it runs partly over  ground partly underground no surprise there but  

in a crowded and environmentally conscious island  there's no limit to the subterranean possibilities  

at this vast nerve center i'm meeting group  director yi boon chao good morning michael buncha  

welcome to the world's largest underground  depot thank you very much see you please  

thank you this massive operation supporting  three of the network's main lines lies 75 feet  

below street level why did you feel you needed  to build the world's largest underground depot  

we are a small country land is scarce so we have  to find innovative ways of making full use of  

our land that we have so one way is to build  infrastructure underground so that we can free  

up space above ground for future development  what sort of operations do you do with the  

trains here the size of this deadpool is about 17  football fields we have 10 maintenance tracks we  

do maintenance on the trains and we also check the  planes every day here before we launch the trains  

out and these trains are fully automated they  do not require a driver these trains are fully  

automated we just need to send a command from the  control center to the train remotely the train  

will wake up by itself check itself and uh prepare  yourself for the launching and why did you move  

to automated trains since 2003 we started this  journey to having fully automated lines because  

we anticipated there will be a manpower crunch  in singapore and we are thinking of how how to  

operate and martin lights with black manpower  we also know that most of the incidents that  

happens on the metros is because of human errors  so by having fully automated lines it's so safer  

for the operations so would you intend to have  uh fully automated trains all over the system  

one day in fact all alliance after 2003 is fully  automated only two lines that were still men with  

drivers are the north south and east west line but  actually the drivers are there more to recover the  

trains if there's a problem they actually  don't operate the trains anymore when it's  

running normally the network is already extensive  stretching for 142 miles around the island with  

139 stations and it continues to expand with  a further 80 miles of track planned by 2030.  

you want to get people out of cars onto trains  yes because in singapore we started to notice  

the roads are getting more congested and so by  expanding our real network we can encourage people  

to take the trains to go to the places they  want to go instead of driving their cars this  

depot's driverless trains are serviced by a giant  computerized warehouse towering 75 feet above us  

it holds around 000 boxes of parts and spares  which are this looks like an underground city of  

skyscrapers what is this thing this is  our automatic storage and retrieval system  

is the largest underground system that we have  in singapore i can believe that hello my name's  

michael great pleasure to see you you just dial up  here and you get whichever part you want yes yes  

so now the machine is starting to  retrieve and the retriever is way up high  

and this rushes towards us on a kind  of monorail it's very fast isn't it

and here's your box say yes i  hope it's the one you wanted

traveling back towards the city center the  next stop on my tour will be a district known  

as little india bradshaw's tells me  that in 1911 the population of singapore  

included 220 000 chinese 40 000 malays  and more surprisingly 27 500 indians  

the british monarch styled himself the emperor  of india and whether his imperial subjects were  

flattered or not quite a large number of them  have pitched up here by one means or another

this neighborhood which fans out from  the main serangoon road with its temples  

markets and traditional craft businesses is  strongly evocative of india colours to die for

mr jaya selvam has been making flower garlands  here for over 30 years hello silvadon my name  

is michael may i join you for a moment sure  definitely that's beautiful work you're doing  

there what are these garlands used for normally  to honor people and special guests to welcome them  

weddings even like going to prayers in  temple everything you need flowers and  

at the moment you're working with orchids  yeah this is orchid our national flowers  

and let me see how you do your knots just one  loop on the down and the other two on the top  

just pull the string you got a knot once  you master the skill you are the king of it  

thank you very much the national flower of  singapore sure thank you sir thank you very much

i'd like to hear more about the history of this  community from professor brian farrell brian  

was a quarter within singapore for the indians  planned by the british they didn't set aside a  

specific community for south asians because in the  earliest years in the 1820s they were a negligible  

community the old guidebook tells me that in  1911 there were 27 and a half thousand indians  

in singapore quite a high number why were there  so many where did they come from well i think  

the big influx was in the middle of the 19th  century when a lot of them were brought over  

as convict laborers to literally build the place  i didn't know that singapore had been used as a  

penal colony how did it compare for columbus with  australia these were people who were serving out  

sentences of finite terms so they weren't sent  here to settle in most cases it seems as if no  

one could be bothered to ship them home but  singapore's booming freeport attracted many  

more from diverse regions of india there was a  fairly steady trickle all along the way from the  

regions that are now bangladesh and east india the  punjabi muslim community in there as well people  

who came here to do business those who had already  established money lending networks international  

financing shipping serangoon road is one of  the major roads leading out of town along which  

development tended to grow and there was a drift  of the south asian community in this direction  

today indians are the third biggest ethnic group  here after the chinese and the indigenous malays  

making up nine percent of the population they  are among the most singaporean of singaporeans  

they remain diverse within themselves a healthy  tamil a majority to be sure but there are also  

muslim and sikh punjabi contingents and they've  made a disproportionate contribution in many many  

ways in the police and the armed forces  in government in the business community  

i would say that they have done very  well here and are well at home here

at the far south of singapore  i'm taking to the skies

this cable car is carrying me across the island of  sentosa which is now noted for its amusement parks  

but all the light at celoso which at the time of  my guidebook was of great strategic importance

fort siloso was built in the 1880s  

and sits on sentosa's northwestern  tip overlooking the singapore strait

the harbour works says bradshaw's are defended  by several forts with some powerful guns  

and submarine mines although japan had been  britain's ally during the first world war  

defending the indian and pacific oceans  against germany when he invaded manchuria  

in 1931 singapore feared the worst  and built bigger guns but they faced  

towards the sea and were of limited value  when japan overran malaya and invaded  

from the north singapore fell in february 1942  one of britain's worst ever military disasters

to understand how events unfolded here i'm meeting  author karen hoisington karen how do the japanese  

forces succeed in reaching singapore i think  there's only one word for the strategy which  

is surprise yeah four o'clock in the morning  the japanese bombers came through to malaya and  

came into a brightly lit singapore bombing was so  easy and they'd catch the singaporeans unprepared

britain believed that her strategic possession  and foremost naval base singapore was impregnable  

the british of course had all the guns facing  this side but they actually were coming in from  

the mangrove swamps on the north west one  of the things that is hard for me to grasp  

is that in those days a good chunk of singapore  was actually jungle then yes it was very much so  

they were very very experienced in jungle warfare  people were called unawares and so the city fell  

in just one week what did the japanese forces do  to the population when they took over there was a  

tremendous massacre they were targeting mostly the  chinese people because of the animosity with china  

the chinese were put in concentration  camps to be massacred in mass graves  

karen's relative elizabeth choi was working in  a hospital along with her husband she risked her  

life to help the allied troops incarcerated in  singapore's changi prison she helped those pows  

in changi with medicines they were starving a lot  of tropical diseases every time an ambulance would  

come with an ailing pow when the ambulance went  back she would put a little package of medicines  

tucked into the ambulance later on it was  discovered that they could send cash and letters  

any parcels from loved ones out  there or people wanting to help them  

but elizabeth was arrested by japanese military  police in 1943 she was incarcerated for 193 days  

there were 20 of them in one small  cell and she was the only woman there  

during her imprisonment was she mistreated she  was electrocuted several times she was had the  

water treatment she was slapped and beaten  but every time when they had finished with  

her she would go back to the cell with her  head held high you know keeping her dignity  

it's estimated that up to 50  000 singaporeans were killed  

during the occupation following japan surrender  in 1945 elizabeth received an obe for her bravery  

when singapore was given back to the british  she was invited by lady mountbatten to come  

and witness the surrender she was invited to  recuperate in london and she was even invited  

to the coronation of queen letters both in 1953  so i think the british showed immense gratitude  

it's a it's a wonderful story  thank you she's a wonderful lady

it's my last day in singapore and  in the heart of the financial center  

i'm intrigued to discover  a splendid old market hall

my brothers refers to perambulating restaurants  and talks about an excellent market daily for  

tropical fruit strange fish and green turtle  and those two ideas come together in this place  

which is known as a hawker center or a food  port this one actually dates from the 19th  

century there are lots in singapore  there's common seating in the middle  

and all the way around the perimeter there  are competing food outlets selling singaporean  

favorite dishes at modest prices is popular  with everyone including city bosses i'm meeting  

up with regular diner tan boon jin who's chief  executive of singapore's stock exchange regulator  

brunjie and i'm thinking amongst all these  towering skyscrapers it is amazing that this  

victorian hawker center has survived yes this  place is called laupassad which means uh old  

market it's an amazing juxtaposition as well  because here you have the old physical market  

and just next door is the singapore exchange  where i work which is the financial marketplace  

um tell me about the singapore exchange you're  listing singapore equities but also forum ones  

that's right so we are the most international  exchange in the world 40 of our listings are  

actually international listings i'm using a  skype which is 100 years old and at this time  

the port was the source of singapore's wealth yes  indeed so we have been busy reinventing ourselves  

from a free port to a manufacturing hub and  today a financial services center today our