The Port of Singapore is the seaport of the city-state of Singapore, spread along the Singapore Strait at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, where ships pass between the Strait of Malacca and the South China Sea. In 2025 it handled a record 44.66 million TEU (twenty-foot equivalent units) of containers, and in Lloyd’s List’s ranking of 2024 figures it was the world’s second-busiest container port after Shanghai. The modern port dates from 1819, when the British colonial official Stamford Raffles set up a free trading post on the Singapore River. It matters because it is the world’s largest transshipment hub and bunkering (ship-refuelling) port: around 90% of its containers in 2024 were transshipment boxes, moved from one ship to another rather than bound for Singapore itself.
Singapura and the Old Harbour, 1300s to 1600s
Singapore was a port long before Raffles. In the late 13th century a kingdom called Singapura grew up on the north bank of the Singapore River, around what historians call the Old Harbour. It was the only port on the southern end of the Strait of Malacca, and it competed with Jambi, Palembang, Kota Cina and other harbours along the strait. The Chinese trader Wang Dayuan described it in his 1349 account, the Daoyi Zhilüe, listing hornbill casques, lakawood and cotton among the goods that ships bought there.
Physical proof arrived in 1984, when the archaeologist John Miksic began digging at Fort Canning Hill and found earthenware, ceramics and porcelain showing that Singapore was an active international trading port in the 14th century. The rise of the Malacca Sultanate in the 15th century drew most long-distance trade away, though local commerce went on and a Portuguese map by Manuel Godinho de Eredia still marked the office of a shahbandar, the Malay official in charge of foreign trade. In the early 17th century a punitive force from Aceh destroyed the settlement, and for roughly two hundred years there was no significant port on the island at all.
Raffles’ free port on the Singapore River, 1819 to the 1860s
Raffles landed in 1819 and chose the island partly for the deep, sheltered water off its southern shore. He had land along the Singapore River reclaimed and handed out to traders: Chinese merchants built along the lower reaches, while English “country traders”, who depended on the annual trade from India, took the upper reaches. In August 1819 his colleague William Farquhar reported a “new harbour”, then used by Orang Laut sea nomads living in boats. That anchorage would later carry the port’s growth.
Singapore had no customs duties, and that decided its early success. Southeast Asian traders preferred it to rival ports with heavier restrictions. By the 1830s it had overtaken Batavia (now Jakarta) as the centre of the Chinese junk trade and taken over from Tanjung Pinang as the export gateway for gambier and pepper from the Riau–Lingga islands. From the 1840s it also became a coaling station for the new steamship lines crossing Asia.
The port lived on three overlapping trade networks. A Chinese network linked it with the southern ports of Fujian and Guangdong; a Southeast Asian network linked it with the islands of the Indonesian archipelago; and a European and Indian Ocean network linked it with the markets of Europe and the rim of the Indian Ocean. Singapore sat where the three met, so cargo arriving on one network left on another, the same transshipment role that dominates its traffic today. It also became the centre of the Teochew trade in rice and marine produce.
Tanjong Pagar Dock Company and Keppel Harbour, 1859 to 1913
Steamships needed deep water and wharves, which the crowded river could not provide, so the port moved to the New Harbour. In 1859 Captain William Cloughton built the first dry dock there, known as Number 1 Dock. In 1864 the trading house Guthrie and Company and the merchant Tan Kim Ching founded the Tanjong Pagar Dock Company, turning former nutmeg plantations into wharves. Within four decades it was the largest docking company in Singapore, with its own police force, largely made up of Sikhs from Punjab, and its own fire brigade. Victoria Dock opened in 1868 and Albert Dock in 1879.
The naval officer Henry Keppel, who had helped clear pirates from the straits in the 1830s and 1840s, surveyed the anchorage, and the new harbour built to his plans was completed in 1886. On 19 April 1900 the Acting Governor, Sir James Alexander Swettenham, renamed it Keppel Harbour in his honour. The colonial government expropriated the Tanjong Pagar Dock Company in 1905 and replaced it with the Tanjong Pagar Dock Board.
From Singapore Harbour Board to the PSA, 1913 to 1971
Under the 1912 Straits Settlements Port Ordinance, the Singapore Harbour Board took over on 1 July 1913. Weeks later, on 26 August 1913, King’s Dock opened at Keppel Harbour; at the time it was the second-largest dry dock in the world. By then Singapore was the administrative capital of British Malaya, and railways and roads carried rubber, tin and crude oil from the peninsula to its wharves for processing and export. The Johor–Singapore Causeway, built in 1923, tied the island to that hinterland by road and rail, but it also made the Straits of Johor impassable for ships, so vessels can no longer sail between the island and the mainland, and the main shipping lane runs through the Singapore Strait to the south.
Independence changed the port’s business. Singapore merged with Malaysia in 1963 and lost its role as the processing centre for the peninsula; after full independence in 1965 it had no hinterland of its own. On 1 April 1964 the Port of Singapore Authority (PSA) replaced the Harbour Board. The government’s answer to the loss of the hinterland was to import raw and part-made goods, add value through manufacturing and refining, and ship them out again, which made fast cargo handling a national priority.
The container years at Tanjong Pagar, 1972 to 2010
PSA began building a container terminal in the early 1970s and handled its first container ship in 1972. About a decade later it passed one million TEU in a year, and by 1990 it handled five million, which made Singapore the world’s largest container port at the time. Trade on the Singapore River ended in the 1980s, apart from passenger boats, as work moved to container terminals at Tanjong Pagar, Keppel and Brani and later Pasir Panjang, with general cargo at Jurong and Sembawang. In the 1990s Singapore overtook Yokohama to become the busiest port in the world by shipping tonnage.
The 1990s also turned PSA into a company. It began investing abroad in 1996 with port interests in Dalian, China. On 2 February 1996 the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore (MPA) was created to take over regulation, and on 1 October 1997 PSA was corporatised, keeping the letters as a brand but no longer as an acronym. A 2003 restructuring made PSA International the holding company; in 2025 its terminals worldwide handled over 105 million TEU. PSA also signed a 40-year contract to run Gwadar Port in Pakistan, which began operating in March 2008 with three berths, although in 2015 it was announced that the port would instead be leased to Chinese operators until 2059. At home, after years of trading first place with Hong Kong, Singapore was the world’s busiest container port every year from 2005 to 2009, until Shanghai passed it in 2010 by roughly half a million TEU.
Tuas and the record year of 2025
The next phase moves the whole container port west. Tuas, at the far western end of the island, began operations in September 2021 and was officially opened on 1 September 2022 with three berths working. Eight more berths entered service by February 2025 and three more by August 2026, and 18 are due to operate by 2027. When complete, Tuas is planned to have 26 km of deep-water berths, more than 1,000 battery-powered driverless vehicles and close to 1,000 automated yard cranes; PSA’s Tuas planners expect it to be the largest fully automated terminal in the world.
The move ends a two-century link between the port and the city centre. The PSA city terminals at Tanjong Pagar, Keppel and Brani are scheduled to close in 2027 and Pasir Panjang in 2040, after which Tuas is projected to be Singapore’s only container port. The harbour Farquhar spotted in 1819, now Keppel Harbour, will still be there, a sheltered stretch of water between the main island and Pulau Brani and Sentosa.
Meanwhile the numbers keep rising. In 2025 vessel arrivals reached a record 3.22 billion gross tonnes, container throughput rose 8.6% to 44.66 million TEU, and sales of marine fuel reached 56.77 million tonnes, up 3.4% on 2024. The traffic comes through a 113 km strait only about 19 km wide, which some 2,000 merchant ships were crossing every day by 2017. Transshipment cargo can switch hubs, and Malaysia built the Port of Tanjung Pelepas, near the western end of the Johor Strait, specifically to compete with Singapore; transshipment makes up more than 90% of its traffic too.
Seen as a whole, the port’s history is a series of moves driven by ship size: from the river mouth to Keppel Harbour, from Keppel to Pasir Panjang, and now to Tuas. The fixed point is the sea lane itself, explained in our guide to what the Strait of Malacca is, and the rival that finally overtook Singapore’s container count is covered in our article on the Port of Shanghai and its offshore Yangshan terminals.