Britain's surrender of Singapore has long been viewed as a "humiliation". Now, a series of exhibits and tours are revealing how this dark event shaped British and Singaporean identity.

This year, millions of people around the world are commemorating the 80th anniversary of the end of World War Two. But 12 September marks a different milestone here in Singapore. Today isn't just the 80th anniversary of when the Imperial Japanese Army formally surrendered to Allied forces – it's also the end of one of the darkest chapters in Singaporean and British colonial history.

Five years after the British East India Company established a trading post on Singapore, the island became a British colony in 1824. Its strategic location at the crossroads of major shipping routes between Asia and the West made it a key economic and military outpost – so much so that Winston Churchill touted it as "the Gibraltar of the East".

"In Britain, [Singapore was] believed to be a fortress – the symbol of Britain's power and dominance in the region," says Stephen Walton, the senior curator at the Imperial War Museum in London.

But starting in December 1941, Japanese forces took Malaya in two months before landing in neighbouring Singapore. Despite Allied forces far outnumbering the 35,000 Japanese troops, the British outpost fell after just eight days, partly due to Japan's superior air power and a "widespread racist stereotyping of the Japanese as being both physically and mentally inferior", explains Walton.

For generations, the fall of Singapore, in which roughly 85,000 British, Indian and Commonwealth troops – including many ethnic Chinese soldiers born in Singapore – were captured, has occupied an infamous place in the British psyche. In fact, Churchill declared it to be "the worst disaster and largest capitulation" in British military history. But while the island has since become most famous for ultra-modern attractions like its futuristic airport and the space age-esque Gardens by the Bay, visiting Singapore's well-preserved and often-overlooked World War Two sites reveals a lesser-known side of its story to travellers.

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