When night falls over Singapore, much of the city gathers on the banks of a narrow, winding river: the Singapore River, the waterway where the city was born more than two centuries ago. On its middle stretch, among colonial warehouses painted in bright colours, beats Clarke Quay, the heart of Singapore's nightlife. What in the 19th century was a bustling loading and unloading wharf, full of barges, coolies and goods, is today a promenade of bars, restaurants, clubs and waterfront terraces, lit up and lively until the early hours.
Clarke Quay is also the best place to hop on a 'bumboat', the roofed wooden boats that once carried goods and now take travellers on a river ride to Marina Bay, passing under historic bridges and in front of the illuminated skyline. By day the area is calm and a little sleepy; at night it turns into a party of lights, music and people moving from terrace to terrace. Around it, the neighbouring quays of Boat Quay —with its restaurants right at the water's edge— and Robertson Quay —more relaxed and trendy— complete the night-time riverside.
This guide covers what to do in Clarke Quay and along the river quays: how much the bumboat ride costs, where to eat and drink, how to get around the riverside and what to see nearby, from historic Fort Canning to the museums at the river mouth. It is the night-owl, festive side of a city famous for its order, and an unbeatable way to see Singapore from the water, where it all began.
The Singapore River is the cradle of the city: it was at its mouth that, in 1819, the Briton Stamford Raffles set up the trading post that gave rise to modern Singapore, and for more than a century the trade that made it prosperous grew along its banks. Clarke Quay —named after Andrew Clarke, governor of the Straits Settlements in the 19th century— was one of the key quays: its 'godowns' (warehouses) filled with spices, rubber, tin and goods that moved up and down the river on barges. Over time, the port moved to modern facilities further west, the river became polluted and the quays fell into neglect. In the 1980s and 1990s, the government carried out a huge clean-up of the Singapore River and restored its warehouses, which were converted into a leisure, dining and nightlife area. And so the old merchant quay was reborn as the festive Clarke Quay of today. The full story of the river, of Raffles and of the birth of Singapore is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The heart of Singapore: the river mouth where Raffles came ashore, the warehouses of colonial trade and the futuristic bay built on land reclaimed from the sea.
Read the history of City Centre and Marina Bay →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Every city has a place where it began, and in Singapore that place is the river. The Singapore River is no mighty waterway (barely a channel of just over three kilometres winding from the interior to the sea), yet it was the artery through which the city's life flowed for a century and a half. Clarke Quay, today's festive waterfront, stands on the banks of that founding waterway, and to understand what it is you have to go back to why people came here in the first place.
Long before the British, the river mouth was already well known: in the 13th and 14th centuries there was a settlement here called Temasek ('sea town'), a trading port linked to the Malay kingdoms and the routes of Southeast Asia, mentioned in Javanese, Chinese and Malay chronicles. Over time that first settlement declined, and the island was left as a place of fishermen and the occasional trader, within the orbit of the Sultanate of Johor.
Everything changed in 1819. In January of that year, an official of the British East India Company named Thomas Stamford Raffles landed at the mouth of the river, saw the strategic potential of the island on the route between China, India and Europe, and signed a treaty to set up a trading post. The decision that changed everything was to declare Singapore a free port, with no customs duties. Within a few years, merchants from half the world flocked to the river, and its banks became the heart of a newborn city.
Throughout the 19th century and much of the 20th, the Singapore River was one of the busiest trade routes in Asia. Its banks filled with 'godowns' (warehouses), trading offices and wharves, and the water was crowded with 'tongkangs' and 'bumboats', the wooden lighters that loaded and unloaded goods from the big ships anchored in the roads. The riches of colonial trade passed through here: spices, rubber, tin, coffee, textiles, opium.
Each stretch of the river had its role. Boat Quay, near the mouth, handled the bulk of the trade and at one point managed three quarters of all the port's traffic. Upstream, Clarke Quay (named after Sir Andrew Clarke, Governor of the Straits Settlements in the 1870s) specialised in warehouses and small industries. The heavy work was done by thousands of 'coolies', immigrant labourers, mostly Chinese, who lived crammed into the shophouses of neighbouring Chinatown and unloaded the sacks and crates by hand, in the heat.
That riverside Singapore was prosperous but also harsh and polluted. The river, the engine of the economy, gradually turned into an open sewer, loaded with waste from trade, homes and the industries along its banks. For decades nobody would have dreamed of going near it for pleasure: it was a place of work, noise and smells, the grimy flip side of the prosperous colony.
The 20th century brought major upheavals. In February 1942, during the Second World War, the Japanese army took Singapore after a lightning campaign, in a defeat Churchill called 'the worst disaster' in British military history. The island was occupied for three and a half years, a very hard period that included dark episodes such as the massacre of thousands of Chinese civilians. Many of the military decisions surrounding that fall were made, as it happens, in the Battle Box bunker, beneath Fort Canning Hill, which overlooks Clarke Quay.
After the war, Singapore moved towards autonomy: self-government in 1959, a brief union with Malaysia in 1963 and, finally, forced independence in 1965. Under the leadership of Lee Kuan Yew, the country embarked on rapid industrialisation and sweeping modernisation. But that same progress doomed the old river: maritime trade moved to modern container ports further west, and the Singapore River quays, with their lighters and warehouses, became obsolete.
By the 1970s, Clarke Quay and Boat Quay were run-down areas: empty or half-used warehouses, a polluted and foul-smelling river, businesses pulling out. The city's historic heart had become a picture of neglect. That was when the government made a decision that would transform the riverfront forever: clean up the river and bring it back to life, this time not as a port but as a place for leisure and memory.
In 1977, Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew launched one of the most ambitious environmental projects in the city's history: a complete clean-up of the Singapore River and the nearby Kallang Basin, which had been little more than sewers for decades. The operation, which took around ten years, was a colossal undertaking: thousands of street hawkers, industries, pig and duck farms, and homes that dumped their waste into the water were relocated; sewerage systems were built; the lighters were removed and the riverbed was dredged. Lee jokingly offered a reward to anyone who managed to catch a fish in the clean river again.
By the late 1980s the river was clean once more, and the government set out to repurpose its banks. Rather than being demolished, the colonial warehouses of Boat Quay and Clarke Quay were declared a conservation area and restored. The old godowns became restaurants, bars and entertainment venues; the lighters that once carried cargo were converted into tourist boats. Boat Quay reopened as a dining area in the early 1990s, and Clarke Quay was relaunched as the city's main nightlife hub.
Later, in the 2000s, Clarke Quay underwent a major redesign, with canopies that shelter the pedestrian streets from sun and rain and a layout built around nights out. And so the run-down merchant quay of the 1970s became the illuminated promenade of bars and bumboats it is today, an example of how Singapore tends to keep the historic façade while completely reinventing what it is used for.
Today's Clarke Quay is one of Singapore's liveliest faces: a promenade of colourful colonial warehouses beside a clean river busy with bumboats, packed with bars, restaurants, terraces and clubs that keep going into the small hours. It is the festive counterpoint to a city known for its order and discipline, the place where locals and travellers cross paths to have dinner, grab a drink and enjoy the lit-up riverfront.
But beneath the neon and the music, the place is still telling its story. The buildings are the same ones that stored the goods of colonial trade; the river is the one that brought Raffles and the communities that founded the city; the bumboats are direct descendants of the lighters that unloaded the ships; and Fort Canning Hill, rising above the quay, holds everything from the palaces of Temasek to the bunker of the 1942 surrender. Walking through Clarke Quay means, without even noticing, walking through two centuries of Singapore's history.
The bumboat ride tourists take at sunset today sums up that continuity well: the same route that goods once travelled towards the sea is now taken by travellers, setting off from the old quays to ultra-modern Marina Bay, with the Merlion and Marina Bay Sands in the background. From colonial port to futuristic skyline in forty minutes on the river: few journeys tell the story of a city so well, one that keeps its eyes on the future while taking care not to erase its past entirely.
