Singapore

Singapore is 733 square kilometres and runs better than most countries ten times its size - a fact its citizens are aware of and its neighbours have complicated feelings about. It is a city-state that decided efficiency and ambition were values rather than defaults, and the result is an airport that wins awards, a food culture of genuine seriousness, and a greenery-to-concrete ratio that no other city of its density has managed. The hawker centres are the democratic heart of it: air-conditioned now in many cases, but still the place where a Michelin-starred chicken rice stall sits next to a laksa that has been made by the same family for forty years.

Our guide is being written from the ground up, with the time this place deserves.

We are still gathering the notes that make a guide worth keeping: hawker centre routes by dish, Chinatown's back streets, Pulau Ubin's last kampung and the rooftop bars where the city's ambition is most legibly on display at night.