Heritage

Shinto is ‘the way of the gods’ and, just as it is for many mortals, sumo wrestling is a favourite pasttime. For nearly 2,000 years, sumo wrestlers have performed their martial art, first in intimate shrines, and then in stadiums before thousands of spectators. At least as early as the 3rd century AD, the wrestlers would perform complex rituals to purify both their body and their spirit, and then fight for the entertainment of the gods during the matsuri (religious festivals). It was a sacred act of ritual, not a sport.

Lush emerald rice paddies provide textural contrast to limpid fish ponds filled with ceaselessly darting pearly carp, attesting to the abundant bounty of the Pearl River Delta, South China’s blessing.

In a world dominated by men, and where education, political power and military strength – all the preserves of men – were the most highly prized of attributes, any ruler who possessed them would be a king. Now and then however, history throws a curve ball. King Tamar was a woman and a great one too.

In recent years, China’s enthusiasm for dam building has spilled over into Southeast Asia. Hydrolancang – a Chinese state-owned enterprise already responsible for no less than seven out of 28 dams in the upper Mekong region – began to construct its very first overseas hydroelectric project in 2013, the Lower Sesan 2 (LSS2) Dam in Stung Treng province of northern Cambodia. The $800 million project, located about 100 kilometres south from the border with Laos, is among the most controversial and destructive in recent years.

The region of islands, Wallacea is named after the pioneering ecologist and geographer Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913), one of the titans of 19th-century British science. His observations of zoological differences to the northwest and southeast of an imaginary line through the Indonesian island of Sulawesi were part of a body of work that, alongside Charles Darwin, reinvented biology through the lens of evolution.

Ruins are, beyond tourist magnets, repositories of knowledge on the history of human civilisation. Reach back in time with these seven locations, each testaments to the ingenuity of mankind and to the rich cultural foundations on which modern Asia stands.

When the government created the city-state’s first hawker centre in 1971, resettling disparate food vendors into a single, well-managed facility, no one could have predicted the peculiarly Singaporean obsession that would ensue.

Chinese immigrants arriving in Singapore took brought with them diverse religions that today live on in ornate places of worship, cemented in Singapore's cultural landscape.