Singapore is a recurring offstage location whose scattered references connect the novel’s scientific, criminal, and personal histories. It is first associated with Johannes Loyen’s research on mummies, then with the international movement of heroin concealed in antiques and Tørk Hviid’s arrest; later, a crew member recalls imprisonment there, and Smilla uses Singapore as a precedent when pressing Ravn about Tørk’s conduct. The city’s importance lies less in a narrated visit than in the way these fragments make it a hinge between distant events and the investigation in Copenhagen.

Research and the Medical Record

In a list of Johannes Loyen’s scientific publications, Smilla finds a study of pre-Buddhist embalming methods in Malaysia and Thailand, published by a museum in Singapore. The item sits among research on mummies examined by X-ray, including work in Berlin and a study of Greenlandic mummies. Singapore therefore enters the record through Loyen’s career as a place where medical and historical investigation intersected, rather than as the setting for a scene Smilla witnesses.

The Singapore publication helps establish the breadth of Loyen’s work. Smilla has been reviewing his papers and clippings as she investigates the circumstances surrounding Isaiah’s death. The article itself does not establish that Loyen’s Singapore research is connected to the crimes she is pursuing, but its presence in the dossier makes the city part of the geography through which she reconstructs his professional past.

An International Criminal Route

Singapore also belongs to the account of how heroin was moved through the antiques trade. Ravn identifies Katja Claussen as originally an antiques dealer and explains that, around 1990 or 1991, investigators discovered that much of the heroin entering the United States and Europe during the 1980s had been smuggled inside antiques. The account shifts the trade from a local Copenhagen concern to an international operation.

Ravn describes Seidenfaden as the transport specialist who arranged shipments of antiques from the Far East for different companies. For a time, he organized a substantial airlift from Singapore through Japan to Switzerland, Germany, and Copenhagen, avoiding the risky airspace over the Middle East. Singapore is thus presented as a starting point in a carefully routed system: the antiques served as cover, while the sequence of destinations carried the cargo toward European markets. When Smilla asks why the people involved are not in prison, Ravn answers that the powerful and talented are seldom punished, linking the route to the novel’s broader concern with unequal accountability.

A later clipping gives this criminal network a dated public trace. It reports that on October 7, 1991, police in Singapore arrested Tørk Hviid, a Danish citizen, and that the consulate lodged a protest on behalf of the Foreign Ministry. Smilla initially says the clipping means nothing to her. Its significance is indirect: it prompts her to remember that Loyen had also been in Singapore, though for the unrelated purpose of photographing mummies. The juxtaposition brings the city’s otherwise separate strands into the same field of investigation without proving that the scientific work and the arrest were connected.

Imprisonment and Memory

Singapore enters the shipboard narrative through a crew member’s account of imprisonment. He explains that his porcelain dental crowns date from his time in a Singapore prison, where, after a year and a half, he had lost his teeth and his jaw had been held together with wire. He says that an escape was eventually organized and that the experience shaped his hatred of the police. The recollection gives the city a personal meaning grounded in confinement, escape, and a lasting attitude toward law enforcement.

This memory is not presented as a complete account of the arrest, prison, or escape. Instead, it surfaces in conversation aboard the ship, where the crew member is explaining that the vessel is governed by overlapping rules, some belonging to the captain and others to Tørk. His Singapore experience lends personal history to that distrust, while leaving the details of the escape and its circumstances unstated.

Singapore as a Precedent in Smilla’s Confrontation

Near the end of the investigation, Smilla and the mechanic use the radio to speak with Ravn. She raises what happened on rooftops in Singapore and Christianshavn, insisting that he listen as she reconstructs Isaiah’s final encounter with Tørk. Her account of the boy’s movements and Tørk’s presence is an interpretation she is advancing to Ravn, not an independently confirmed recollection of events in Singapore. The paired locations make the earlier episode a precedent against which she challenges Ravn to understand the later one.

Smilla asks whether Tørk’s presence alone had been enough in Singapore, or whether he pushed the woman because she was older and more rational than the boy. She then brings the image of a child standing near Ravn into the confrontation, connecting it to the boy on the roof and to Tørk’s role in driving him onward. Ravn finally reveals that the woman’s name was Ravn. The revelation identifies the woman in the Singapore episode as someone connected to Ravn and changes the meaning of Smilla’s comparison: Singapore is not simply another distant site in the criminal network, but part of the concealed personal history she has forced into the open.

Narrative Significance

The novel builds Singapore through documentary fragments, professional records, a crew member’s recollection, and a climactic radio exchange rather than through a continuous scene set there. Each mode supplies a different kind of knowledge: Loyen’s publication places Singapore in a medical archive; the transport account maps it onto a criminal route; the prison memory ties it to an individual’s distrust of police; and Smilla’s confrontation makes it crucial to Ravn’s hidden past.

These strands remain distinct even as they accumulate. The novel does not establish that Loyen’s research, the heroin shipments, the arrest of Tørk, and the woman’s death belong to one single event. Their convergence instead gives Singapore the structure of a recurring clue: a place that returns through records and testimony, each time altering what can be inferred about the people and systems under investigation.