Bartender, Ngiam Tong Boon, is credited with inventing the world-famous Singapore Sling, a smooth, slow, sweet cocktail with a complex flavour which aficionados will best enjoy in Raffles’ old-world Billards Room bar.

Opened in 1887, the hotel came to epitomize the hey day of the British empire. Kipling, Conrad, Noel Coward and Günter Grass all stayed here, but the guest with whom its faded gentility became most closely associated was the writer Somerset Maugham, who famously remarked that Raffles “stood for all the fables of the exotic east”.