MALAYA: Boom & Terror

TIME Correspondent Dwight Also Martin found Singapore enjoying the biggest, most riotous boom in its 132-year history. Last week Martin cabled:

SINGAPORE’S English-speaking inO habitants know it best as “The City of Smells.” If there is one predominant smell in Singapore today, it is not the withering blast of the garlic the natives put in their food, or the sickly sweet smell of the Zam-Zam hair oil they put on their heads; the strongest and biggest smell in Singapore is the sulphurous stench of unprocessed rubber. To the people of Singapore all the perfumes of Araby could not smell as sweet.

Rubber has skyrocketed Singapore’s prosperity. A record 703,891 long tons were produced in Malaya last year, another 448,989 long tons-imported from Indonesia, Siam and Indo-China for processing in Singapore plants. At the beginning of 1950, rubber was selling for a little over 17¢ a pound. Then the price began to rise furiously, hit a high around 80/ a pound. The buyers: U.S.A. (35% of Malayan production), Britain, Europe, Red China (up 600% from 1949) the Soviet Union and European satellites (up 28% from 1949).

Whenever the price takes a nip-up, there is a wild scramble in the offices of Lewis & Peat, the world’s largest rubber brokers, whose daily turnover frequently reaches $90 million. In the Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank’s new million-dollar, air-conditioned office, an hour’s business will see clerks and tellers chest-deep in bank notes.

Depreciation of the Pith Helmet. The rubber boom and less spectacular booms in tin and pepper have bounced salaries and wages all along the line. The rich are spending their money on bigger and flashier cars (a Rolls-Royce is no rarity in

Singapore), larger and more elegant homes, wild and lavish partying. They win & lose tens of thousands of dollars at mah-jongg and soo-sek (a game like rummy). Aw Boon Haw, the fabulous “Tiger Balm King,” has added a nightmarish swimming pool to his huge Singapore residence; on the bottom of the pool are outsize hand-painted statues of mermaids, Oriental-style (see cut).

The 16-story Cathay building, Singapore’s only skyscraper, is aglow nightly with a Broadway-style electrically lighted advertisement of Esther Williams in The Duchess of Idaho. Less ornate cinemas run serial thrillers (the kind shown for U.S. kids on Saturday mornings), with all twelve episodes run together in four-hour sittings. This week’s favorite; Bomba, the Jungle Boy. The dance halls, puppet shows, Balinese dancing-girl acts, shell games and other enticements of the “Great

World” and the “Happy World” amusement parks are breaking all previous attendance records; consumption of liquor is at an alltime high.

Shops and bazaars are jammed with Chinese women in high-collared silk dresses, Malay women in brightly colored sarongs, Indian women in saris. They spend money freely, balking only occasionally at the steadily soaring prices. Inflation keeps pace with prosperity: already a can of Canadian salmon, a relatively expensive dish to begin with, is appreciably cheaper than fish caught along Singapore’s own waterfront.

Chinese amahs who never before had permanents have them now. Pedicab drivers who used to be barefoot are sporting new, all-leather sandals. The pith helmet is no longer the hallmark of the pukka imperialist; the helmets, many of them carefully coated with aluminum, gilt or yellow paint, sit grandly atop the heads of coolies. These days an Englishman would rather walk into the lobby of the Raffles Hotel without trousers than be caught wearing a pith helmet.

The Slashed Trees. Meanwhile, a handful of fanatical Communists wages a bloody and murderous-campaign of terror. Each day brings its spate of outrages. Grenades are thrown into Singapore cafes, restaurants or movies, and patrons are killed or badly wounded. Said a British official: “We have no idea how many firms and individuals are paying extortion money, but their numbers must be in the thousands, and the amount they pay truly staggering.”

On their remote plantations the planters live behind barbed wire, go about armed and with bodyguards. Communists have murdered ten of the 42 European planters in the state of Pahang. Every month Communists slip into the rubber estates, slash the rubber trees. In one month last year they slashed more than 67,000 trees, and a slashed rubber tree is out of production for about seven years.

The Communists hide in the deepest jungle, draw supplies and information from the Min Yuen, a clandestine corps of Chinese sympathizers who live in small villages on the edge of the jungle. The British are gradually disposing of the Min Yuen by means of a resettlement project which aims at moving 400,000 “alien Chinese” (i.e., Chinese immigrants) away from known Communist areas. Combating the Communists there are now 110,000 police and 25,000 soldiers, including nine battalions of British, eight of Gurkhas, and four (soon to be six) of Malays. They are supported by some R.A.F. planes and Royal Navy ships. Despite all efforts, however, the number of Communists does not seem to diminish, but stays consistently between three and five thousand.