In collaboration with

Also by Pico Iyer

A Beginner's Guide to Japan
Autumn Light
The Art of Stillness
The Man Within My Head
The Open Road
Sun After Dark
Abandon
Imagining Canada
The Global Soul
Tropical Classical
Cuba and the Night
Falling Off the Map
The Lady and the Monk
Video Night in Kathmandu

In writing about home, I have to offer lifelong thanks to the two families that took such loving care of me when I was young, the Campbells (who taught me constancy) and the Hunts (who taught me global mobility). And I owe forever thanks to the irresistibly kind and spirited Singaporeans who've given me a lasting home online, David Tang and Jeff Cheong and all their friends at the Pico Creative Centre.

"I went, looking for beauty and romance and glad to put a great ocean between me and the trouble that harassed me. I found beauty and romance, but I found also something I had never expected. I found a new self."

-Somerset Maugham, on travelling across the Pacific

THE LEGEND COMES TO LIFE AGAIN

"An iconic Grand Dame will remain grand only if it keeps up with the standards expected by customers in this day and age."

-Lee Kuan Yew, on Raffles Hotel as
the twenty-first century dawned

Of course it has to be my first stop on my first day back, after the seventeen-hour flight from San Francisco. But when I arrive at the low-level jewel-case tucked amidst the skyscrapers, it's to find a line already snaking around the white verandah. There's been no official notice of the event-no advertisement-but word has clearly crackled around all of Singapore: after nine months of being shuttered, the first public space of the new Raffles Hotel has opened again, three hours ago.

I step out of the blinding sunlight, into the cool and the dark. I might be stepping into my life from thirty-four years ago, on the day of my first visit here. Peanut shells are scattered across the hardwood floor. Gunny sacks and rattan chairs sit under the undulating hula-sway of gossamer-thin fans fluttering from the ceiling. In one corner Elizabeth Taylor, in a large, framed black-and-white photo, appears to be helping herself to a piece of history; in another, Somerset Maugham is taking silent measure of the storied bar in its latest incarnation.

At the far end of the new Long Bar an elegant young woman in a grey suit and high ponytail is shaking up something zesty and strong, here at the very site where the Singapore Sling was invented, one hundred and three years ago. The Sikh doorman, commemorated in photographs on every continent, is seated at the bar, impeccable as ever in his starched white uniform and turban, gold epaulettes gleaming as strangers quiz him about his twenty-eight years of guiding eminences into and out of their chariots. An elderly couple in new-millennium sola topis-floppy white bonnets-sit red-faced from the sun as they take relieved sips of their tall pink elixirs. The sounds of Nagoya and Madrid and Somerset crisscross in the air around me.

A calm sense of festivity prevails-a bottle of Pimm's beckons just behind the polished bar-and yet, I think, it's something subtler that offers a sense of release here. To get to the three-storey structure this morning, I've had to walk along underpasses leading to passageways, up moving staircases and in and out of shopping malls, through many-storey towers and past convention centres. Everywhere crowds are surging along these linear networks, like pieces of data being transmitted to London or Beijing. When I step out at last into the street, I count twenty-one high-rises poking into the heavens, and just this one intimate sanctuary at their heart.

Within the bar, there's no sound of traffic at all. I can almost smell the frangipani, the heliconia and bird's-nest ferns from the four named gardens all around. Through the windows I see green on every side, and the wedding-dress walls of other parts of the hotel, commanding an entire city block. It's not just the nostalgic furnishings and familiar libations here that take one back; it's the sense of leisure and rocking-chair ease. In a city that's all business and movement, here I can feel I'm human again, freed from to-do lists to do anything-or nothing-at all.

A couple of blocks away, temporary stands have been erected for the Formula One Grand Prix. Drivers will be roaring through the old civic heart at speeds approaching three hundred and fifty kilometres per hour. The whole city seems to be moving at a similar velocity, a kind of pace car for the new century, as it races towards its two hundredth anniversary as a global settlement.

But here at Raffles, I'm brought back to something emotional that hasn't changed in decades, and speaks for what connects us more deeply than anything in Starbucks or Uniqlo. A pop-up shop around the corner is selling the hotel's coveted Champagne Truffle Snow-Skin Mooncakes, for Mid-Autumn Festival, as famous as the Christmas carolers who gather around the tree in the lobby in December. A temporary gift-shop down the road is ensuring that visitors can return to their other homes, in Bristol or Fukuoka, with Raffles-encrusted tea towels and sugar bowls. Members of the Raffles staff have been showing me photos of the twenty-second-century spaces that are being built only metres away to give the hotel a new dynamism and brightness. Any legend that's been around for one hundred and thirty-two years knows: it can honour the past only by changing with the times.

*

Is there any hotel anywhere so inseparably linked with the city around it as Raffles? I've been orbiting the globe for forty-five years now, and I have yet to find one. The peace and civility of the hotel offer a respite from the busy city exploding all around it, but the fact remains that you can't really say you've been to Singapore until you've stepped through the columned corridors of Raffles. My wife feels she's done justice to New York even though she's never set foot inside the Plaza; I've been haunting London for six decades, and have never had cause to enter the Connaught. Raffles, however, is something different, the rare hotel that's not just a base for sightseeing but an indispensable sight in itself. Often, I suspect, people come to Singapore to visit Raffles as much as they come to Raffles to enjoy Singapore.

Even the antic natural historian Redmond O'Hanlon, on his way to confronting head-hunters in the jungle, took pains to specify that it was in Raffles that he opened Smythies' Birds of Borneo. And the repeat residents who form such a large part of the hotel's family think no more of stepping out of the place than they would if visiting cousins for the weekend.

The Singapore that's celebrating its bicentennial as a trading hub for the West as well as the East is more restless, more youthful, more outward-looking than ever; its people earn on average fifty times more than they did when I was a boy. But both city and hotel are keenly aware that, when I was a boy, the first question you'd ask of someone was "Where do you come from?" Now the more relevant enquiry is, "Where are you going?"

Outside, more than six hundred workers have been labouring for four hundred days to bring the institution into a new century. The entire façade has been stripped back by hand, through thirty and even forty layers of paint. "For a building that's white," Raffles' director of marketing Jesmine Hall confesses to me over lunch, with a laugh, "there's a lot of paint." Salt that has been encrusted in the building's pillars since the days when it stood along the sea has been painstakingly removed, a process that takes three weeks. Every one of Raffles' 886,000 items-antiques, beds, chandeliers, a $120,000 Persian carpet-has been meticulously catalogued and placed into storage, to be taken out again soon.

Since this is a historic monument, not a nail can be removed without the approval of the National Heritage Board. After the hotel reopens, the grandfather clock that stands as steady as the lobby around it (and is perhaps even older) will still be tolling the hours as it has done for decades, and when it strikes eight every evening, you may still hear Noël Coward's "I'll See You Again". The cast-iron verandah and balustrades and cornices-and everything such terms evoke-will still mark out the property as unique. But as the hotel advances boldly into a new millennium, seventeenth-century vases have been auctioned off to make room for a fresher sense of luxury.

The new Raffles is not your grandmother's Raffles, in short, any more than the city around it is your father's Singapore. As I look around the Long Bar, I can imagine I'm keeping company with an elegant great-aunt, who's seated quietly in one corner of a cocktail party, while smooth young executives in expensive suits push themselves forwards to dazzle one another with talk about their futures. The beauty of her presence is that she radiates poise and style and wisdom even when she's doing nothing. The deeper beauty is that she'll never be young or old.

*

A rush of hot air had assaulted me the instant I stepped out of the plane, on my first night ever in Singapore. The tarmac was still black from a recent downpour. I'd never seen an airport so sleek or spotless as Changi, so perfectly a home for visitors from everywhere. But what hit...