Short answers, pulled from the story.
Singapore became an independent country, the Republic of Singapore, on the 9th of August 1965, after the Malaysian Parliament voted 126 to 0 to separate it from the Federation of Malaysia. Lee Kuan Yew became its first prime minister and Yusof bin Ishak its first president.
The name Singapore comes from the Malay Singapura, derived from the Sanskrit Siṃhapura, meaning 'lion city'. The Malay Annals attribute the name to Sang Nila Utama, a 13th-century Sumatran Raja who said he saw a beast on the island he took to be a lion.
The British governor Stamford Raffles arrived on the 28th of January 1819 and established Singapore as a trading post of the British Empire. The Treaty of Singapore was signed on the 6th of February 1819, and a further treaty in 1824 made the entire island part of the British Empire.
Japan occupied Singapore after a British force of 60,000 troops surrendered on the 15th of February 1942, a defeat Winston Churchill called the worst disaster in British history. Between 5,000 and 25,000 ethnic Chinese were killed in the subsequent Sook Ching massacre, and the island returned to Britain after Japan's surrender in 1945.
The People's Action Party has governed Singapore continuously since 1959, winning large parliamentary majorities in every election. Academics describe the country as a de facto one-party state or illiberal democracy, with the Workers' Party as the most prominent opposition.
Singapore expands through land reclamation, growing from roughly 580 square kilometres in the 1960s toward 770 by the 2030s. Because neighbouring countries restricted sand exports in the 2010s, it increasingly uses polders, enclosing an area and pumping it dry, as at Tekong Island.