St John's Island

Background
Situated south of mainland Singapore, St John’s Island was a quarantine centre and penal settlement but is now a holiday resort. The island was where Stamford Raffles initially landedon 28 January 1819, before he headed to mainland Singapore the following day.¹ By February 1823, the signal flagstaff at Pulau Tambakul (known as Kusu Island today) had been moved to St John’s.²

Prewar
In the 19th century, St John’s Island was the station for the Marine Department to report health news of sick immigrants until the cholera epidemic of 1873, which resulted in 448 deaths.³ The epidemic prompted the master attendant, Henry Ellis, to call for a lazaretto to be built on St John’s, in addition to a floating police station, a hospital at St John’s and a quarantine burial-ground on Peak Island.⁴ The plan was approved by the Governor, and the lazaretto at St John’s was completed in November 1874, just in time to attend to more than 1,300 cholera-infected Chinese coolies brought in by the S. S. Milton.⁵ This marked the beginning of St John’s Island Quarantine Station. It became the largest quarantine station in the British Empire and one of the largest in the world by the 1920s with 6,000 beds.⁶

Postwar
In the 20th century, the need for such quarantine stations declined, and the island was increasingly used for other detention purposes after the Japanese Occupation.⁷ When the Emergency was declared in 1948, half of the quarantine centre was repurposed to become a detainee’s camp until they were moved to a Detainees’ Rehabilitation Centre in Yio Chu Kang in 1953.⁸ The detainees’ camp was then converted into an opium treatment centre in 1955.⁹ For a few months in 1975, the patients under treatment were moved out of St John’s, so that the centre could temporarily house South Vietnamese refugees fleeing the takeover of South Vietnam.¹⁰ After the refugees left, the People’s Association and Sentosa Development Corporation jointly opened a holiday camp in 1976 with subsidised rental rates.¹¹

In the late 1980s, the Tourism Promotion Board started to develop the Southern Islands into a resort.¹² This resulted in the land reclamation and building of walkways to link St John’s with Lazarus and Seringat islands. The reclamation and construction were completed in 2006.¹³

In 1996, the Urban Redevelopment Authority designated the island group around St John’s – consisting of the Sisters’ Islands, Lazarus, Kusu and Seringat – a Marine Nature Area under the National Parks Board.¹⁴ Following that, in 1998, the Tropical Marine Science Institute (TMSI) was established by the National University of Singapore on the island to conduct research. Its launch was delayed by plans to use St John’s for housing illegal immigrants,¹⁵ and in 2022 the TMSI laboratories on the island finally became operational.¹⁶ A variety of research projects were carried out at the laboratories, from dolphin communication to anti-fouling paints and eco-friendly coastal marine infrastructure development.¹⁷

The Agro-food and Veterinary Authority established a Marine Aquaculture Centre on St John’s in 2003 to conduct research that would increase local fish supply and reduce dependence on caught fish.¹⁸ Efforts were made to protect the coral reef ecosystem in the area, with the Sisters’ Islands Marine Park set up in 2014.¹⁹ On 9 May 2024, it was announced that part of Lazarus Island and a reef off Kusu Island would be designated marine parks in 2025.²⁰

Variant names²¹
Malay name: Sekijang Bendera or “deer flag”.
Chinese name: Qi Zhang Shang meaning “Mount Qi Zhang” referring to the island’s hill.



Authors
Anasuya Balamurugan and Timothy Pwee



References
1. Charles E. Wurtzburg, Raffles of the Eastern Isles (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1984), 484. (Call no. RSING 959.570210924 RAF.W-[HIS])
2. Walter Makepeace, Gilbert E. Brooke and Roland St. John Braddell, eds., One Hundred Years of Singapore, vol. 1 (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1991), 478. (Call no. RSING 959.57 ONE)
3. Makepeace, Brooke and Braddell, One Hundred Years of Singapore, 492; “Legislative Council,” Straits Times Overland Journal, 4 October 1873, 7. (From NewspaperSG)
4. Lee Y. K., “Quarantine in early Singapore (1819-1874) Part II,” Annals Academy of Medicine 7, no. 1 (January 1978): 87–88 (Call no. RCLOS 614.46095957 LEE); Makepeace, Brooke and Braddell, One Hundred Years of Singapore, 506.
5. Lee Yong Kiat, The Medical History of Early Singapore (Tokyo: Southeast Asian Medical Information Center, 1978), 299–300. (Call no. RSING 610.95957 LEE)
6. “St. John’s Island: Singapore’s Quarantine Island,” Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 2 April 1923, 12. (From NewspaperSG)
7. Lee, “Quarantine in Early Singapore (1819-1874) Part II,” 87.
8. “Detainees Housed at St. John's,” Sunday Tribune, 29 August 1948, 1 (From NewspaperSG); “Detainees Moved to New Training Centre,” Straits Budget, 26 February 1953, 16. (From NewspaperSG)
9. Patricia Morgan, “Whole World Watches This Store Experiment,” Straits Times, 5 February 1955, 8 (From NewspaperSG); “Centres to Cure Opium Addicts,” Singapore Tiger Standard, 9 February 1955, 3. (From NewspaperSG)
10. “St John's Addicts Move Out,” Straits Times, 7 May 1975, 22. (From NewspaperSG)
11. “Holiday Camps on St. John's Isle,” Straits Times, 18 February 1976, 5. (From NewspaperSG)
12. “Bids Invited for ‘Tropical Playground’ Study,”Business Times, 10 May 1989, 2 (From NewspaperSG); “Proposal to Turn Southern Islands into Multi-million-$ Resort,” Business Times, 3 September 1993, 2. (From NewspaperSG)
13. “Nod for $144m Island Reclamation,” Business Times, 29 October 1996, 2 (From NewspaperSG); “Targeting Nature Lovers and the Well-heeled,” Straits Times, 1 December 2006, 6. (From NewspaperSG)
14. Dominic Nathan, “Saving Singapore’s Slowly Deteriorating Coral Reefs,” Straits Times, 14 June 1996, 3. (From NewspaperSG)
15. Sandra Davie, “1st Tropical Marine Institute Soon,” Straits Times, 24 April 1998, 1 (From NewspaperSG); Toh Boon Ngee, “From Pirates' Lair to Science Lab,” Today, 4 October 2002, 4 (From NewspaperSG); Tan Kok Siang et al., “A Short History of TMSI@St John’s Island,” in Contributions to Marine Science, ed. Tan Kok Siang (Singapore: Tropical Marine Science Institute, National University of Singapore, 2012), vii. (Call no. RSING 551.46 CON)
16. Davie, “1st Tropical Marine Institute Soon”; Toh Boon Ngee, “From Pirates' Lair to Science Lab,” Today, 4 October 2002, 4. (From NewspaperSG)
17. Steve Dawson, “Soon You'll Be Talking to the Dolphins,” Sunday Times, Sunday Plus, 18 July 1999, 6 (From NewspaperSG); Beth Jinks, “S'pore May Be First to Offer Viable TBT Alternative,” Business Times, 29 November 2001, 1 (From NewspaperSG); Shobana Kesava, “Developing Shorelines the Eco-friendly Way,” Straits Times, 6 December 2008, D8. (From NewspaperSG)
18. Joy Frances, “Fishy Culture,” Weekend Today, 7 June 2003, 6. (From NewspaperSG)
19. “S’pore Designates First Marine Park,” Straits Times, 21 July 2014, 5. (From NewspaperSG)
20. Leow Wen Xuan, “S’pore plans to designate second marine park in its southern islands,” The Straits Times, 10 May 2024, A1.
21. “History of St John’s,” Straits Times, 25 February 1999, 29. (From NewspaperSG)



Further resources
Tan N, “Health and Welfare,” in A History of Singapore, ed., Ernest Chin Tiong Chew and Edwin Lee (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1991), 341. (Call no. RSING 959.57 HIS-[HIS])

Urban Redevelopment Authority (Singapore), Southern Islands Planning Area: Planning Report 1996 (Singapore: Urban Redevelopment Authority, 1996) (Call no. RSING 711.4095957 SIN)



The information in this article is valid as of January 2024 and correct as far as we are able to ascertain from our sources. It is not intended to be an exhaustive or complete history of the subject. Please contact the Library for further reading materials on the topic.