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Saint John's Island ( MS Pulau Sekijang Bendera) also known as St John's is an island in the Straits of Singapore located 6.5km off the southern coast of Singapore, with latitude 1°13′08.30″N and longitude 103°50′53.88″E. At an area of 41.23 km2, it is the largest of the Marine Park islands which also include the Sisters' Islands and Pulau Tekukor. St John’s was colonised by the British along with mainland Singapore in the 19th century and was the site of a colonial quarantine centre and detention centre. Singapore gained independence under the Government of Singapore in the 20th century and maintained sovereignty over St John’s. In the present day, the island has doubled as grounds for recreational facilities and aquaculture research and development facilities.

The island is part of the Jurong Rock Formation and contains both tropical rainforest and coastal habitats. It is populated by several nationally critically endangered species of plants and animals. Currently, the island has no permanent inhabitants.

Etymology
The name 'St John’s’ is an English corruption of its Malay name Sekijang (also known as Sakijang) by the Stamford Raffles’ British delegation, who had come to establish a port in the neighbouring island of Singapore in 1819. According to a member of the delegation, John Crawfurd, they had misinterpreted the locals' name for the island, Sekijang, as 'St John'.

St John's Island's original name Sekijang combines two Malay words, si, meaning either 'barking,' 'one' or 'roe', and kijang, meaning 'deer'. Encik Jaffar Hussein, a former chief of one of the other Southern Islands of Singapore, provides an unverified origin story. According to Jaffar’s story, the Southern Islands had two deer, which eventually split up. One deer went to St John's Island, while the other went to Lazarus Island; since each island had a deer, they shared the name Pulau Sekijang, meaning 'one deer island'. In fact, St John’s Island and the neighbouring Lazarus Island once shared the English name ‘St John’s Island’—they were called West and East St John’s respectively—and the Malay name Pulau Sekijang. Eventually, St John Island's Malay name became Pulau Sekijang Bendera, with Bendera referring to the flagstaff that existed from 1823 to 1833. East St John’s was later renamed ‘Lazarus Island’ when a beriberi hospital was built there in 1899. Lazarus island is now known as Pulau Sekijang Pelepah in Malay, with pelepah meaning ‘palm fronds’.

The original Chinese name of St John’s, Qizhangshan, meaning Mount Qizhang, refers to a hill at the centre of the island and is a transliteration of sekijang. Its Chinese name was later officially replaced with a translation of its English name, ‘St John's Island’ (Chinese: 圣约翰岛; pinyin: Shèngyuēhàndǎo).

Early Colonial History
Stamford Raffles and members of his delegation anchored off St John's on 28 January 1819, a day before they arrived at mainland Singapore to establish a British trading port. After a port was established that year, soldiers were stationed on St John's Island to inform passing ships in the Straits of Singapore of the new port. By February 1823, the British had transferred the signal flagstaff from Kusu Island (formerly named Goa Island or Peak Island) to the highest peak of St John's Island for its wider view. However, additional plans to erect a lighthouse did not materialise.

By 1830, the island's facilities like the flagstaff were reported by the officer in charge of public works to be in a dilapidated state. They were not repaired because the government did not plan to continue the signal station. Visitors to the island such as George Bennett (naturalist) in 1834, and Dr Robert Little (first Coroner of Singapore) in 1848, concurred that it was virtually abandoned, with only one Malay inhabitant. In 1848, a suggestion by a medical community to use St John’s or one of the other Southern Islands as a leprosy quarantine centre was rejected by the government.

Quarantine Centre
The increasing numbers of immigrants to Singapore from the late 19th century onwards heightened the risks of epidemics, thus leading to the establishment of a Quarantine Centre on St John's. Initially, the Quarantine Ordinance (No. 7 of 1868) was implemented to mitigate the epidemic risks; it prohibited all infected ships from docking at port. In July 1873, despite the orders of Governor Harry Ord to quarantine all ships from Siam, a boat from Bangkok caused a cholera epidemic that lasted two months and resulted in 857 infections and 448 deaths. Consequently, Acting Master Attendant Henry Ellis proposed that a quarantine station be constructed on St John's Island. Although there were plans for a steam cutter, a floating police station, a hospital on St John's and a burial ground on Kusu Island to support the quarantine station, it largely comprised of largely comprised of attap huts when first completed. Governor Harry Ord officially approved the proposal in a speech at the Legislative Council on 21 March 1874.

The St John's Island quarantine station opened on November 1874 and served not just immigrants to Singapore but also Muslims returning to Malaya after their pilgrimage to Mecca. The month it opened, the station quarantined more than 1,000 Chinese passengers on the cholera-infected S.S. Milton which was travelling from Swatow to the British colonies Penang and Province Wellesley. In 1890, Muslims on the Queen Margaret who were returning after their Hajj pilgrimage were quarantined on St. John’s. The 1894 Hong Kong outbreak of bubonic plague prompted the Quarantine Station to prepare to receive bubonic plague victims. A plague hospital was constructed and ships were inspected, with one case of bubonic plague caught in March 1896.

Aside from the addition of the plague hospital, more facilities were added when the station was further redeveloped. Since 1903, more than 300,000 dollars had been spent on the station’s development. New facilities included muster sheds for passengers to disinfect and change clothes; boiler houses for disinfecting belongings. Other facilities include a coroner’s court, a police station, jail and Sikh police barracks; a post office; storehouses of loose sulphur for fumigating ships; a temple and a mosque; coolie and workmen’s quarters, and gardeners’ quarters. Additionally, a burial ground for the quarantine station’s deceased was sited on Lazarus Island.

The improved facilities came in time to also serve as emergency accommodations in 1911 for the rising number of beriberi victims in the late 1890s and early 1900s. In August 1911, the overflow patients and beriberi victims in Tan Tock Seng Hospital were quarantined on St John’s as one of the beriberi patients had been infected by a cholera outbreak.

In the early 20th Century, the quarantine centre was further equipped and had developed one of the largest quarantine operations in the British Empire. By 1924, the St John's Island quarantine station had a maximum capacity of 6,000 people. Between 1903 to 1923, the station inspected approximately 8 million people and quarantined 300,000. A model of the quarantine station was featured at the Malaya Pavilion at the British Empire Exhibition held in Wembley in April 1924. By 1930, the quarantine station was capable of vaccination and was equipped with a dispensary, telephone wires, and disinfection buildings with Izal solution spray.

Despite the quarantine laws and the island’s treatment facilities, not all passengers were quarantined nor received the same level of care due to classism. Unlike steerage class passengers, cabin class (first and second-class) passengers were not required to undergo quarantine. Health examinations for sailors were also less demanding. By contrast, Chinese coolie were allegedly provided insufficient food, no bedding, and forced to labour. Complaints were made to no avail.

The St John's quarantine station officially closed on 14 January 1976 because the popularisation of air travel had drastically reduced the number of arrivals by boat.

Detention Centre
St. John's Island served as a World War I and World War II internment camp. In August 1914, right after World War I began, almost all German men in Singapore were interned in St. John's Island and Tanglin Barracks while women and children were detained in Kuala Lumpur. Besides civilians, enemy combatants were also interned on the island. The crew manning SS Markomannia and SS Pontoporos—the latter being a Greek collier captured by the Germans—were imprisoned on St John's on 17 October 1914. In total, 296 enemy nationals were transferred from St John's to Australia by 1916. During the second world war, enemy foreign nationals—some of whom were fleeing Nazism—were interned at St. John's Island in 1940. Of these, the Germans who were to be removed from the war were interned in Ceylon. As for the rest, some were deported to neutral grounds like Shanghai, while others were transported to Australia, including German-Jewish Werner Baer (musician) and his family. Separately, the Japanese subsequently allied with the Germans and invaded Malaya. Shortly after, the Japanese women and children in Singapore were also interned on St John's Island and later shipped to Calcutta. When the Japanese Occupation (1942–1945) of Malaya began, Allied prisoners of war were detained on St John’s Island.

The Malayan Emergency (1948–1960) sparked by the Communist Party of Malaya caused St John’s to resume operating as a detention centre for political prisoners. In 1947, the Communist Party of Malaya initiated a guerilla war against the British colonial government in hopes that it would be more effective in turning the Federation of Malaya and the Crown Colony of Singapore communist. Fatal attacks committed in the Federation of Malaya on June 1948 as part of this war culminated in the British colonial government declaring a state of emergency, thus enacting the Essential Regulations Proclamation on 24 June. This granted the government the authority to arrest and detain anyone without trial. Expecting an influx of political prisoners, St John's Island was officially announced as the site of the new detention centre on 3 July 1948 and became a protected area from 10 September onward.

Political prisoners of St John’s comprised not only communists but also suspects and individuals of other political leanings, from both Malaya and Singapore, who sought to overthrow the colonial government. St John’s received its first batch of detainees on 20 September 1948, comprising 200 political prisoners from Johore Bahru. Putting aside St John’s long-term detainees, ship travellers suspected of communist inclinations were also detained under the Emergency Travel Restrictions Regulations until they were cleared of suspicion. Singaporean political prisoners detained on St. John's Island comprised university students, teachers, newspaper editors and several future politicians of Singapore. Notable detainees include Devan Nair, who was General Secretary of the Singapore Teachers' Union at the time of his first arrest in 1951, and President of Singapore in 1981. Nair was arrested again in October 1956 and transferred from Changi Prison to St. John's in January 1959, along with fellow People's Action Party (PAP) members Fong Swee Suan and Lim Chin Siong. They were released from St John’s detention centre in June 1959, after Singapore was granted full internal self-government and the PAP won the 1959 Singapore general election.

Site of drug rehabilitation centres
From 1945 onwards, the British sought to curb opium addiction in Singapore and this led to the establishment of St John’s Opium Treatment Centre. The British Administration of Malaya banned opium in its colonies in October 1945. The following year, the Opium and Chandu Proclamation further restricted drug activity by banning opium smoking and the possession of opium-smoking devices. Yet, there were still more than 1,400 opium dens in 1949.

In the 1950s, the government tackled drug activity more aggressively through legal means, vice operations, and the establishment of an Opium Treatment Centre on St John's. They revised the Dangerous Drugs Ordinance of 1951 in 1953 to increase their authority to prosecute opium-related crimes, and initiated vice operations, such as the major opium crackdown of 1952. The Opium Treatment Centre was established under an amendment to the Dangerous Drugs Ordinance in 1954 and was the colonial government's first attempt to rehabilitate addicts. Formerly, addicts were simply imprisoned. Institutions have previously attempted to rehabilitate addicts but only a fraction of patients were permanently cured. The centre opened in February 1955 and was managed by the Prisons Department.

The opium treatment programme had three phases: withdrawal, rehabilitation and follow-up. Gradual withdrawal from opium typically lasted two to four weeks in the prison hospital. The subsequent rehabilitation phase would last six months to a year at the Opium Treatment Centre on St. John's Island, during which patients were taught new skills such as carpentry to aid future reintegration into society.

The experimental opium rehabilitation programme was noteworthy for medical institutions and was later claimed to cure the majority of those admitted; however, its criteria of admittance were controversial. During the centre’s opening, the Commissioner of Prisons Major Sochon claimed that the United Nations Organisation had taken note. It was claimed by the Singapore Free Press claimed that only six of about 400 addicts treated within two years of its opening had relapsed. By 1966, more than 4,000 opium addicts had been rehabilitated at the centre. By the 1970s, opium addiction had greatly declined, although the extent to which this success can be attributed to the treatment centre is unknown. Additionally, the centre’s apparent success must be prefaced by their denial of treatment to long-time addicts whom they evaluated to be incurable.

Despite the decline in opium addiction specifically, the number of arrests due to drug offences, in general, had increased between 1971 and 1973. The Singapore government's efforts in the war against narcotics in 1973 included converting the Opium Treatment Centre to a Drug Rehabilitation Centre for treating all types of drug addicts, especially young adults. This rehabilitation centre was shut down in 1975 as the island was to be redeveloped by the Sentosa Development Corporation into a resort centre.

Temporary Settlement for Refugees
St John Island was also a temporary settlement for refugees in the 20th century. In 1955, the quarantine station housed residents of Lazarus Island, after a rare high tide destroyed their homes. In the mid 1970s, the rehabilitating drug addicts were temporarily moved out when eighty-four Vietnam War(1955–1975) refugees were settled on the island. The final batch of refugees departed for a permanent host country in late 1975. Additionally, the government planned to use St John's Island as a detention centre for illegal immigrants, in anticipation of a mass of Indonesian seeking refuge after the May 1998 riots of Indonesia; however, the latter did not occur.

Holiday camp and aquaculture research centres
In the mid 1970s, the Sentosa Development Corporation planned to redevelop Singapore’s offshore islands into resort centres. However, proposals to redevelop St John's as a holiday island with restaurants, golf courses and an integrated resort-casino fell through. Instead, the 3 million dollar budget was spent on developing a holiday camp on the island with sports and games facilities. A three-day outdoor activities camp for schools was established on the island in 1975.

St John's Island is currently the site of several aquaculture research and development facilities. The Marine Aquaculture Centre (MAC) is a hatchery completed in June 2003, and the National Marine Laboratory was established in 2002.

In April 2018, traces of asbestos was found in construction debris around the island's campsite, lagoon and holiday bungalow areas. The two residents on the island was evacuated and were assessed to be healthy. The affected areas were cordoned off and access to the island was restricted. The contaminated debris was then removed.

Geography
St John's Island has a land area of 41.23 km2 and is located in the Strait of Singapore, about 6.5km from the southern coast of mainland Singapore. Its location is at longitude 1°13′08.30″N and latitude 103°50′53.88″E. All the Southern Islands, including St John’s, are formed by the Triassic rocks of the Jurong Formation. St John's Island's original area of 33.59 km2 was expanded by 7.64 km2 through land reclamation in the 1970s. In 2006, Lazarus Island and Seringat Island were merged and then connected to St John's via a causeway. St John's coastline comprises sandy beaches, quarry rocks to prevent erosion, lagoons, cliffs, and mangrove swamps. Like Singapore, St John’s has an equatorial climate with rainfall throughout the year, especially during the first half of the Northeast Monsoon.

In 2020, restricted access to the protected lagoon, Bendera Bay, was opened to the public via programmes.

Biodiversity
The island’s tropical forest and marine habitats are home to crustaceans and cetaceans in the Singapore Strait and land animals. The island is also surrounded by coral reefs. The nationally critically endangered Asian Drongo Cuckoo can be found on the island, as well as nesting grounds of the critically endangered Hawksbill Turtle.

St John's Island is covered by natural vegetation (32.0%), the majority of which is managed coastal vegetation (60.6%). More than 258 species of vascular plants have been recorded on the island, including several nationally critically endangered species such as the Podocarpus Polystachyus R Br (Sea Teak) and the Xylocarpus rumphii (Meliaceae).

The Sentosa Development Regulations (1997) were implemented to protect the biodiversity of Singapore’s offshore islands. Among other regulations, it prohibits killing or capturing any animal, bird, insect, or plant.

Demographics
St John's Island is currently uninhabited. From 1962 to 1963, there were more than 400 islanders. Between 1976 and 1977, the residents of St. John's Island, Lazarus Island and Seringat Island were relocated to the mainland, and the remaining four islanders on St John's left in 2017. St. John’s Island English Primary School, the only school on the island, was shut down in 1976.