Jurong and Tuas

Jurong Island and Tuas Port show how Singapore makes room for industry and shipping: by joining islands and by building a new port in stages. If your business moves goods or containers through Asia, these are the two projects to know.

Jurong Island

Jurong Island was formed from seven islands with a combined area of 991 hectares. Reclamation enlarged it to about 3,000 hectares and was completed on 25 September 2009.

Tuas Port

Tuas Port opened on 1 September 2022 with three berths. Its first phase is reported at 21 berths and 20 million TEU, due in 2027. The full build is reported at 65 million TEU in the 2040s.

The port of Singapore in figures

The port handled a record 44.66 million TEU in 2025, up 8.6 per cent, and its bunker sales reached a record 56.77 million tonnes. Government wording as reported puts it second by containers, behind Shanghai. Trade was the first business of the place. The free-port principle of 1819 opened the harbour to every flag, while the river, the godowns and the flow of information carried the entrepôt economy. Today’s commodities business, from oil and bunkering to liquefied natural gas and agricultural trading, is one of the pillars of the book on the financial centre.

Practical points

Singapore has 29 free trade agreements in force, which is worth checking early when you plan a supply chain through the port. For a trading company the tax questions usually start with the 17 per cent corporate rate, the 9 per cent GST and the withholding tax on payments abroad, which is 15 per cent on interest and 10 per cent on royalties unless a treaty gives relief. The articles below cover commodity trading and trade finance, followed by the wider Singapore sections.

Commodity trading and trade finance

Singapore · Origins

The Entrepôt Economy: Junks, Country Traders and Merchant Networks

The free port of 1819 created the conditions for trade. The traders themselves came from every direction, bringing their own ships, goods, customs and systems of credit.

Singapore · Origins

The junk trade from the southern Chinese ports

The oldest commercial link of Singapore was the link with China. Chinese junks had sailed to the ports of the Nanyang for centuries, as the first chapter of this part has shown.

Singapore · Origins

Bugis, Arab, Indian and European traders

The Bugis traders of Sulawesi, who had made Riau prosperous in the eighteenth century, followed a different rhythm.

Singapore · Origins

Country traders and the opium economy

No account of the entrepôt economy can omit opium. In the ports of Southeast Asia, Indian opium was a trade good, a medium of exchange and a source of government revenue.

Singapore · Origins

The hinterland: gambier, pepper and the planter’s credit

The entrepôt did not live from transit trade alone. From its earliest years the island had a plantation economy, run almost entirely by Chinese planters, most of them Teochew.

Singapore · Origins

The agency house as intermediary

The agency house was the central institution of the European commercial community. Its name described its function: it acted as agent for principals elsewhere.

Singapore · Origins

The infrastructure of the entrepôt: river, godowns and information

The physical infrastructure of the early port was simple.

Singapore · Origins

Credit chains between Europe, India, China and the archipelago

The entrepôt economy ran on credit. A typical transaction in cotton goods illustrates the chain.

Singapore · Origins

The entrepôt economy and the comparison with Geneva

Geneva and Singapore both built their early commercial prosperity on networks of merchants who trusted one another because they belonged to the same community.

Singapore · Origins

The Entrepôt Economy: Junks, Country Traders and Merchant Networks: summary

The entrepôt economy of nineteenth-century Singapore brought together Chinese junk traders, Bugis prahu fleets, Arab and Indian merchant houses and European and Indian country traders, each…

Singapore · Colonial Economy

Tin, Rubber and the Straits Dollar

Singapore has never mined a ton of tin or tapped a commercial rubber estate of any size on its own soil.

Singapore · Colonial Economy

The tin boom and the Malayan hinterland

Tin had been worked in the Malay Peninsula for centuries, but the modern industry began with a discovery in the district of Larut, in northern Perak.

Singapore · Colonial Economy

Rubber: from botanical experiment to global commodity

Tin had been known in the peninsula for centuries, whereas rubber was a botanical import.

Singapore · Colonial Economy

Price cycles, speculation and commodity crises

An economy built on two commodities lived with their price cycles. The tin industry experienced its first serious slump in the mid-1870s, just as the Residential system was being established.

Singapore · Colonial Economy

The Straits dollar and the currency board system

The tin and rubber trades were conducted in silver dollars.

Singapore · Colonial Economy

Commodities as the first link to the trading hub

The tin and rubber economies taught Singapore the functions that a commodity hub performs.

Singapore · Colonial Economy

Tin, Rubber and the Straits Dollar: the comparison with Geneva and Hong Kong

Geneva and Singapore reached monetary stability by different routes. Switzerland introduced the Swiss franc by the federal coinage law of 1850 and joined the Latin Monetary Union in 1865.

Singapore · Colonial Economy

Tin, Rubber and the Straits Dollar: summary

The discovery of tin in Larut in 1848 drew Chinese miners and Straits capital into the western Malay states, whose disorders led to the Pangkor Treaty of 1874, the Residential system and in 1896 the…

Singapore · Commodity Trading

From Entrepôt to Trading Hub: The Global Trader Programme

Singapore was founded as a place where goods changed hands. Two centuries later it is a place where commodities change owners, often without ever touching its shores.

Singapore · Commodity Trading

The legacy of the entrepôt

The commercial identity of Singapore was defined at its foundation.

Singapore · Commodity Trading

The Global Trader Programme

The modern incentive framework began in 1989.

Singapore · Commodity Trading

Tax incentives and substance requirements

The Global Trader Programme is an administrative label. Its legal basis is section 43I of the Income Tax Act 1947, headed “Concessionary rate of tax for global trading company and qualifying company”.

Singapore · Commodity Trading

Enterprise Singapore and the trading sector

The agency that administers the programme has changed its name several times. Trade promotion was long the task of a statutory board that was later known as International Enterprise Singapore.

Singapore · Commodity Trading

Measuring the weight of commodity trading

The simplest indicator of the trading hub is the number of companies under the programme.

Across the Singapore financial centre

Singapore · Book

Singapore as an International Financial Centre — preface

Few places show as clearly as Singapore that a financial centre can be built by design.

Singapore · Origins

A Place on the Strait: Temasek, Singapura and the Maritime Trade of the Malay World

Every financial centre begins with a place.

Singapore · Origins

The Strait of Malacca as a corridor of trade

The Strait of Malacca owes its importance to the winds.

Singapore · Origins

Temasek and Singapura in the fourteenth century: archaeology and chronicle

The history of the island before 1819 rests on three kinds of written evidence: Chinese travel and geographical literature, Javanese court poetry and the Malay historical tradition.

Singapore · Origins

Malacca, Johor and the Riau archipelago

Malacca, founded around 1400 by the refugee prince from Singapura, became within a few decades the greatest port of Southeast Asia.

Singapore · Origins

Portuguese, Dutch and British rivalry in the Straits

The Portuguese who conquered Malacca in 1511 brought a new model of trade to the Strait.

Singapore · Origins

What the pre-colonial port teaches about location and trust

The history of the Strait before 1819 shows that geography creates opportunity. The island of Singapore occupied an exceptional position that remained unchanged throughout the period.

Singapore · Origins

A Place on the Strait: Temasek, Singapura and the Maritime Trade of the Malay World: summary

The island of Singapore controls the southern exit of the Strait of Malacca, the shortest sea route between the Indian Ocean and China, a position that made it a potential market from the earliest…

Singapore · Origins

Raffles, the East India Company and the Free Port of 1819

On 6 February 1819, in a ceremony on the plain beside the Singapore River, a servant of the English East India Company signed a treaty with a Malay prince whom he had recognised as sultan a few days…

Singapore · Origins

The East India Company and the China trade

The English East India Company, chartered in 1600, was by the early nineteenth century a hybrid without parallel: a joint-stock company whose shareholders met in London and a sovereign power that…

Singapore · Origins

Stamford Raffles and William Farquhar

Thomas Stamford Bingley Raffles was born on 5 July 1781 on board the ship Ann off Port Morant, Jamaica, and entered the service of the East India Company in London as a clerk in 1795, at the age of…

Singapore · Origins

The agreements with Sultan Hussein and the Temenggong

Raffles’ expedition landed on St John’s Island on 28 January 1819 and arrived at the Singapore River the next day.

Singapore · Origins

The free-port principle: open to every flag

The decision that shaped Singapore more than any other was the decision to make it a free port.

Singapore · Origins

Early growth and the first merchant community

The growth of the settlement in its first years was spectacular. In the first year, the value of trade was reported at 400,000 Spanish dollars.

Singapore · Origins

What 1819 means for the financial centre

The founding of 1819 established the institutional foundations on which the financial centre was later built.

Singapore · Origins

Raffles, the East India Company and the Free Port of 1819: summary

The East India Company founded Singapore in 1819 to secure the route of its China trade and to break the Dutch hold on the southern Strait, under a cautious mandate that sought a British station…

Singapore · Origins

The Treaties of 1824 and the Legal Foundations of British Singapore

The treaty of 6 February 1819 gave the East India Company a trading post on an island whose legal status was contested. The Dutch disputed the authority of the sultan who had signed it.

Singapore · Origins

The Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824

The dispute over Singapore was one of several questions that divided Britain and the Netherlands in Asia after the Napoleonic Wars. Both powers had an interest in a settlement.

Singapore · Origins

The Treaty of Friendship and Alliance of 1824

The agreement of 7 June 1823 had already transferred the judicial powers and land rights of the sultan and the Temenggong to the British in exchange for lifelong monthly payments of 1,500 and 800…

Singapore · Origins

The Straits Settlements and the Second Charter of Justice

In 1826, the East India Company combined its three possessions in the Strait – Penang, Malacca and Singapore – into a single administrative unit, the Straits Settlements.

Singapore · Origins

The reception of English law

The Second Charter did more than establish a court.

Singapore · Origins

Land, title and the security of property

A financial centre depends on secure property rights. Land is the most important form of collateral. A mortgage is worth only as much as the title on which it rests.

Singapore · Origins

Practical consequences for today’s practitioner

The history examined in this chapter is not merely of antiquarian interest. Several of its consequences confront the practitioner who advises on Singapore matters today.

Singapore · Origins

Legal foundations and the comparison with Geneva

Geneva and Singapore built their financial centres on different legal traditions.

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