The Hills Went Into the Sea
Singapore has grown by roughly a quarter since independence, first by cutting down its own hills and tipping them into the sea, then by buying sand from its neighbours until Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia and Malaysia each stopped selling. What it builds now — a Dutch-style polder, a caisson wall at Tuas, an 800-hectare sea defence off the east coast — is shaped by that refusal and by a rising sea.
Stand on the Padang in the middle of Singapore and you are standing on a beach. In 1822 the sea came up to roughly where Connaught Drive runs; the cricket pitch was the strand, the esplanade was an esplanade, and everything seaward of it — the war memorial, the theatres, the whole of Marina Bay with its hotel and its gardens and its reservoir — is fill. Walk twenty minutes south-west to Telok Ayer Street, whose name means water bay, and you find a temple built in 1842 by people who had just come off boats onto that street. It is now four blocks from any water.
Singapore covered about 580 square kilometres when it became independent. It covers roughly 735 today, an increase of about a quarter, and the published land use plan aims at something near 766 by 2030. The mechanics of how that was done are the most consequential thing about the country: they explain the port, the housing, the water supply and the current state of relations with two neighbours.
The hills went first
The early material was domestic. From 1966 the state ran what is still called the Great Reclamation along the east coast, and the fill came out of Singapore's own high ground — the hills at Bedok, Siglap and Tampines were quarried flat and carried to the shoreline by the lorry-load. Something like 1,500 hectares of what is now Marine Parade, East Coast Park and the airport approach came out of that exchange. It is why East Coast Road, which sounds like a coast road, sits a kilometre inland with a park and an expressway between it and the sea, and why the eastern third of the island is conspicuously flat.
Then it had to be bought
Hills are finite. By the 1980s the fill was arriving by ship, dredged from the seabed and the rivers of the region, and for most of the following three decades Singapore was by most counts the largest importer of sand in the world — a country of five million buying more of it than states twenty times its size, because sand is what land is made of. Sand is also the second most extracted material on earth after water, and it is not renewable at anything like the rate it is being used. River and marine sand has the angular grain that concrete and reclamation both need. Desert sand, of which the wider region has a great deal, is wind-rounded and close to useless for either.
The sellers stopped selling, one at a time and each for its own reasons. Indonesia banned sea sand exports in 2007, after islands in the Riau archipelago were measurably reduced and at least one was reported to have gone altogether. Vietnam banned the export of construction sand in 2009. Cambodia announced a permanent ban in 2017, after a campaign by the group Mother Nature drew attention to a decade-long gap between what Cambodia declared it had exported to Singapore and what Singapore declared it had imported from Cambodia — a discrepancy of tens of millions of tonnes in the United Nations trade data that neither side has ever explained convincingly. Malaysia banned sea sand exports to Singapore in 2018, which became public a year later. Indonesia then reopened a route in 2023 by permitting the export of dredged "sea sediment" under a new regulation, over considerable domestic objection.
Every square kilometre of new Singapore is a hole somewhere else, and the places with the holes eventually notice.
Land that does not need a heap of sand
The engineering answer is visible in two places. At Pulau Tekong, off the north-east coast, Singapore has built its first polder with Dutch help — roughly 810 hectares enclosed behind about ten kilometres of dyke. The reclaimed ground sits below sea level and is kept dry by drainage and pumps rather than being piled above it on imported fill, and it therefore swallows a fraction of the sand a conventional reclamation of the same size would need. At Tuas, the new container port was formed by sinking a line of prefabricated concrete caissons — 221 of them, each about the height of a nine-storey building — to make the sea wall, then filling behind it with dredged material and with soil excavated from the island's own tunnels, the deep sewer network and the newer MRT lines. Singapore now treats the spoil from digging holes in itself as a raw material.
The second reason to build land
The newest projects are not about space at all. Around three tenths of Singapore lies less than five metres above mean sea level, and the national climate projections put the rise by 2100 at up to a metre before storm surge and high tide are added to it. In 2019 the prime minister told the country it might have to spend S$100 billion or more over a century on coastal defence; a Coastal and Flood Protection Fund followed the next year with S$5 billion in it. In November 2023 the planning authority published Long Island — about 800 hectares in three tracts off East Coast Park, raised higher than the land behind it, functioning as a sea wall that happens to be developable and enclosing a new reservoir on the way. The island spent sixty years building land because it needed room. It is now building land because the sea is coming back.
What is left of the first coastline
Very little, and it is worth the trip. The natural shore survives in fragments — the rocky stretch at Labrador, Berlayer Creek beside it, the mangrove at Sungei Buloh on the Johor Strait, and above all Chek Jawa on the eastern tip of Pulau Ubin, where six ecosystems meet on one flat. Chek Jawa was scheduled for reclamation in 2002 and was deferred at the end of 2001 after an unusually loud public campaign, on the stated grounds that the land was not needed yet: a reprieve rather than a protection, and one of very few occasions on which a Singapore reclamation has been stopped by argument. Stand on the boardwalk at low water and the arithmetic is in front of you. This is what most of the coast looked like, and this is very nearly the only place left where you can check.