3am Stories
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He smuggled an ashtray into a meeting. It led to a $2 billion deal for Singapore.

2 March 2026

In the 1980s, no ministry in Singapore was allowed to own a computer. Only the Ministry of Finance had that privilege. Philip Yeo was running...

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He asked the government how much Singapore was worth.

16 April 2026

They told him it would take 56 man-years to find out. He was the President of Singapore, and the one job he’d been elected to do was protect the...

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There was a time when Singapore’s rivers were so filthy that fish couldn’t survive...and one man was given ten years to fix what looked unfixable.

12 February 2026

Most people today have no idea who he was. His name was Lee Ek Tieng. And if he had failed, Singapore would not look... or smell ...the way it does...

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After the war, the British asked her to identify her torturers.

17 April 2026

She'd spent 193 days in Kempeitai custody. Electric shocks applied to her body for fifteen minutes at a time, water pumped into her until she...

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Before he died, Wee Kim Wee made one request.

3 May 2026

He asked to be cremated and for his ashes to be placed at Mandai Columbarium, with ordinary citizens, instead of at Kranji, where Singapore's...

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In 1979, Chen Show Mao was the top student in Singapore's A-level examinations.

8 July 2026

Number one in the country. He outperformed Vivian Balakrishnan and Lui Tuck Yew, two classmates who would go on to become PAP ministers and hold some...

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In 1999, a chimpanzee named Ramba pulled her lip down to show him she was bleeding.

7 June 2026

Louis Ng was twenty years old, a volunteer zookeeper helping out at photography sessions with the chimps. Ramba was about a year old. A playful...

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There’s a reason Changi Airport works the way it does and it has nothing to do with architecture or luck.

13 February 2026

It comes down to one man who obsessed over things most people would dismiss as trivial. His name was Sim Kee Boon. And if you’ve ever breezed through...

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In the early 1970s, a trainee nurse from Kuala Lumpur went to a dance in London.

25 August 2026

A law student from Singapore asked her to dance. His name was Chiam See Tong. He would go on to become one of the longest-serving opposition MPs in...

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He Ting Ru met her husband at a party.

14 June 2026

Not the kind with balloons and a DJ. The Workers' Party. At a rally in January 2013, during the Punggol East by-election, she spotted a man on stage...

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He once earned about $1,000 a month tutoring JC students just to pay his own university fees.

16 February 2026

Today, he shapes the manpower policies of an entire country. That trajectory didn’t happen by accident. Before he became Singapore’s Minister for...

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6 days.

25 June 2026

That's how long it took Nicole Seah to become the most popular politician on Facebook in Singapore. She was 24 years old. She'd never run for...

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Every other minister who sat in Singapore's first cabinet is dead.

11 May 2026

One is still alive. He's 97 years old. His name is Ong Pang Boon. You've almost certainly never heard of him. I know I didn't prior to writing this....

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The Seat He Gave Away

4 July 2026

In 2015, Gerald Giam was offered a seat in Parliament. He gave it to someone else. His Workers' Party team had just lost East Coast GRC for the...

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Every time you pay GST in Singapore, you're paying a tax introduced by a chemist.

20 June 2026

Not an economist. Not a banker. A man who studied molecules at Berkeley, earned his PhD in chemical engineering at Birmingham, lectured at...