Asia's most strenuously efficient country, Singapore has lately been trying its hand at…fun. Pico Iyer gets with the program

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Was I dreaming it, or was Singapore, with its customary efficiency, offering me just the symbols I wanted? I picked up a tourist brochure as soon as I arrived in the leafy metropolis this past spring and read that the Old Parliament House had become home to something called "New Age curries," and that the trendiest restaurants (Graze and One Rochester) had annexed the old British army barracks of Rochester Park, now a high-tech district called One North. The Convent of the Holy Jesus, a colonial-era girls' school, had been restyled as Chijmes, a complex of chic restaurants that serve, among other things, a Kahlua-spiked tiramisu. Tabletop dancing and bungee jumping were now legal in a city that had, until two years ago, banned Cosmopolitan and Sex and the City. The effect was uncannily like that of seeing the classic movie scene in which a prim, law-abiding young lady takes off her glasses, shakes loose her hair, and shows us what she's been made of all along.

Singapore may not be the wildest place in the world, but as I looked in on it for the third time in five years, I could not help but feel that makeovers are its latest love. Connaught and Havelock, Draycott and Cairnhill—the sonorous old British names still toll above the flower-edged roads of this strip of tiny islands only 85 miles north of the equator. But what fills those same streets, more and more, is "royal Thai spas," collagen parlors, and "bust enhancemen" centers, which give a curious literalism to my image of a place that is redoing itself in styles as bold as its colors, as international as its markets, and as seductive as its tropical air.

This compact city-state of four million has always been for me a handy way of taking the measure of Asia, or at least of its dreams. For almost 150 years Singapore was the classic British port, founded by Sir Stamford Raffles, carefully segregating its races into the areas known today as Chinatown, Little India, and Arab Street. In the last four decades it has stood, high and shining, as the gleaming but often repressive transnational city of the moment. Now, however, having opened up to the global culture while preserving what it calls Asian values, Singapore is turning into a model of the Asian city of the future. Deng Xiaoping famously came here in 1978 to find a blueprint for encouraging free enterprise while retaining strict governmental control; these days, it's hard not to see Singapore as what Shanghai (or Saigon) dreams of becoming.

The first time I visited this lyrical city at the tip of the Malay Peninsula was—too perfectly—in 1984. In those days, it still had the languid grace notes of a musty artifact of the British empire. Raffles Hotel still rented out huge, slightly dusty rooms for $60 a night, its fans turning slowly, slowly, and the ghosts of Noël Coward and Somerset Maugham threw long shadows across its lawns. The last few transvestites sashayed up and down Bugis Street, reminders of a time when Singapore, a city of opium and anything for a price, gave new meaning to the term free port. I happened to be staying, on that trip, in a crumbling old colonial pile just off Orchard Road, where one earnest young character in glasses showed me photos of the sex-change operation (s)he was getting and other seemingly unoccupied young ladies kept drifting out into the night. Everywhere, the aromatic backstreets and decaying houses conjured up the seedy possibilities evoked by Maugham's successor, the sometime Singapore resident Paul Theroux, in novels such as Saint Jack.