Mount Serapong

Route to Summit: From the road that goes around the Sentosa Satellite Earth Station, follow the road "Serapong Hill Road" upwards. On the higher reaches of the road you will pass by some 1936 vintage buildings , remnants of Fort Serapong. Eventually you will reach the Sentosa service reservoir. Just before that, on the left up the slope, there is a dirt path that you can follow. The dirt path is easy to follow, soon you will see more remnants of Fort Serapong and Serapong Battery, including an much photographed impressive casemate bulilding. The path goes on upwards, rounds a bend and you will see Battery Observation Post (BOP) that is mentioned in the "History" section below (See picture below). The summit of Mount Serapong is right behind the BOP and can be reached by bashing through some vegetation. Here is a blog page (by yours truly) with more detailed description and directions.

History:

Some of the writeup below is excerpted from my blogpage.

Probably the first depiction of Mt Serapong on maps is on a map/hydrographic chart published in May 1819. The Figure below shows an excerpt of that map, "Plan of Singapore Harbour February 1819" [1]. The map was prepared by Daniel Ross, who was part of the flotilla that brought Stamford Raffles in his attempt to found a trading post in this part of the world. That's when he landed and leased Singapore in late Jan./early Feb. 1819, thus beginning the British presence in Singapore. The map, with detailed depth sounding around the seas off the mouth of Singapore river and the southern coast of Singapore, was first published in May 1819 in the Calcutta Journal. Although still unmarked and unnamed. You can see the eastern end of "Island of Goa" which is today's Sentosa Island, and on it is marked a spot which is most likely Mt. Serapong.

A very early sketch which was also made in February 1819, is probably the first picture of Mt. Serapong (See Figure below). This historical sketch entitled "Sketch of the land round Singapore Harbor Feb 7 1819" [2] is probably done by an officer on board a ship that was part of the flotilla which brought Raffles to Singapore (See above paragraph) [3]. The sketch portrays a view of the seafront view of Singapore from a position not too far off today's Marina Barrage. The sketch contains a view of Mount Serapong and Sentosa (Marked with a red arrow in Figure below). If you are interested in more details regarding this sketch, please check out an earlier blog entry of mine here.

In a map made in 1827 by Daniel Ross, on a later visit to Singapore, Mt. Serapong (still unnamed in this chart) is distinctively marked as the 'Highest hill on Blacan-mattee' (Figure below). Blacan-mattee or Blakang Mati, being the old name for Sentosa. This is from a hydrographic chart entitled "A Plan of the Harbour near Singapore" [4].

The earliest mentions of the height of Mount Serapong that I can find so far is on a 1846 Hydrographic Chart by S. Congalton and J.T. Thomson (The 'Thomson' of Thomson Road, who was the the Straits Settlement's Government Surveyor then) [5] (See Figure 4), on which a height of 308 feet is indicated. At about the same time, on print, in an article published by James Low regarding the geology of Singapore in 1847, in which he writes about Blakang Mati was also mentioned its height, "This island is about 2 1/2 miles long with a maximum height of about 308 feet." [6].

Mount Serapong finally got its name on a hydrographic chart published in 1851 entitled "New Harbour". The chart is prepared by J.T. Thomson [7]. On this chart however, was recorded a height of 302 feet for the height of Mount Serapong (See Figure below).

According to a facebook page written by the Urban Explorer of Singapore, The toponymic origin of 'Mt. Serapong' (and presumably a village and a creek with the same name) is a plant known as 'Seratong' (Tabernaemontana corymbosa).

Some time in the 1830s, a flagstaff was raised on Mount Serapong's summit which was later moved to Mount Faber in 1845 [8]. From 1878 onwards, Mount Serapong, which strategically looks over the channel that later became 'Keppel Harbour', started to see sustained military activities and constructions [9]. For people interested in this interesting bit of military history of Mount Serapong, do check out this two following references [8, 10]. These military activities and later development probably shaved a few meters off the its summit. The military armanents and constructions include a pair of late 19th century 8 inch guns, which were later replaced by 9.2 inch guns in 1910. In the 1930s, however, these guns became obsolete and were removed. The summit of Mt Serapong was then converted to become the Battery Observation Post (BOP) for the series of more modern 9.2 inch guns at the foot of Mt Serapong at the Fort Connaught battery (nowadays peacefully embedded in Tanjung golf course). By the 2nd World War, there was no longer any active artillery pieces on the summit, and the summit of Mt Serapong is occupied with a observation post. The remnants of this BOP is still slowly decaying on the summit of Mount Serapong (Photo above at "Route to Summit" section).

On the 1898 edition of "Map Of the Island of Singapore And Its Dependencies" [11], the height of Mount Serapong was labelled as 278 ft (84.7 m) (Figure below). This height (either in feets or in metres) seems to appear as the height that was attached to Mount Serapong in most maps, all the way down to present day (In some cases, they were denoted as 277 ft).

However the 278 ft point does not denote the actual summit height, and could be just the trigonometrical height of a spot lower than the actual summit. On some more recent maps, such as the 2005 Singapore 1: 50,000 topographical map, apart from the trigonometrical point labelled as 85 m, there is also a benchmark height of 89.81m (See figure at the top of this page) which I surmise is the actual summit height of Mount Serapong.