The Singapore dollar

What Singapore spent before its own dollar

Archaeologists have found Chinese coins, most of them from the Northern Song dynasty, at digs on the site of fourteenth-century Temasek. After the British trading settlement was founded in 1819, Indian and Javanese rupees, Dutch guilders and Spanish silver dollars all changed hands, and in 1823 the Resident declared the Spanish dollar the settlement's legal currency. The East India Company tried to make the Indian rupee official through Currency Acts of 1835, 1847 and 1855, but trade carried on in Mexican dollars.

Private banks filled the gap with paper, starting with the Oriental Bank's notes in 1849. A currency board for the Straits Settlements took the sole right to issue notes in 1897, and it introduced the Straits dollar in 1903. The Malayan dollar followed in 1940. During the Japanese occupation from 1942 to 1945 the military yen took over, called banana money after the plant on its $10 note, and by 12 August 1945 it had fallen to 950 to one Straits dollar. From 1953 the Malaya and British Borneo dollar served the whole region.

Why the shared currency with Malaysia broke up

Singapore kept the common currency when it joined Malaysia in 1963 and after the separation in 1965. The two governments negotiated over a common currency and failed to agree, and in 1967 Singapore, Malaysia and Brunei each began issuing their own.

They kept a system of interchangeability, under which banks in each country accepted the others' notes and coins at par and without charge. Malaysia left it in 1973, and Singapore and Brunei still keep it.

How the dollar is backed and managed

The Board of Commissioners of Currency, Singapore, set up in 1967, worked as a currency board. The Monetary Authority of Singapore, founded in 1971 to gather central bank functions spread across government, merged with the board on 1 October 2002 and became a central bank with the power to issue notes. The authority states that everything issued since 1967 is fully backed by its assets. In 2017 the government announced that the separate Currency Fund would merge with the authority's other funds.

The dollar began pegged to sterling. When sterling was devalued in 1967, Singapore kept its peg to the US dollar instead, and in 1973 it moved to a managed float against a basket of its trading partners' currencies.

Which notes and coins have circulated since

Four series of notes have followed one another: orchids in 1967, birds in 1976, ships in 1984 and the Portrait series of 1999, which carries Yusof Ishak on the front. Polymer notes, with a small clear window in one corner, are gradually replacing the paper ones. The Orchid series ran to nine values, the $10,000 among them, and the authority stopped issuing the $10,000 note from 1 October 2014 to reduce the risk of money laundering.

The coins came in three series, in 1967, 1985 and 2013. The first dropped the British monarch's effigy that earlier coins had carried, the second took a floral theme, and the third shows Singapore landmarks. A $1 coin replaced the $1 note in the 1980s. Singapore opened its own mint at Chartered Industries of Singapore in 1968, and in 1984 Thomas De La Rue opened a plant in Jurong to print the notes.