Posted Monday, July 31, 2006; 20:00 HKT

If Tan Puay Hin ruled the world—if, like Kublai Khan, he possessed fabulous wealth and an army that scattered enemies with the mere rumor of its advance—he would still probably prefer to do most of his ruling from a skyscraper in downtown Singapore.

Tan is the chief operating officer of PSA, the company that runs Singapore's port. We meet at his company headquarters, in a well-appointed 40th-floor office offering a godlike view of the port. Ships the length of three football fields sidle up to gargantuan dockside cranes; tens of thousands of containers are stacked up behind in multicolored canyons of steel. It looks like a Bond-movie set waiting for an explosive finale. Tan, 52, himself appears to be a mild-mannered salaryman—pencil moustache, plain suit, chosen-by-my-wife tie—but he commands an operation of global reach and brain-scrambling complexity. Every year, Singapore handles some 20 million shipping containers riding on 200 shipping lines serving 600 ports in 123 countries. At PSA, Tan Puay Hin's nickname is "The General."

At that moment, I stand up, march onto the balcony, and scream into the wind: "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" Okay, so I don't. I made that up. I just sit there and listen to Tan talk about capacity enhancement and resources planning, stuff like that. Once you get over its epic scale, Singapore port is mainly remarkable for its remorseless efficiency, and General Tan—a modest, affable chap—is justly proud of it. "Most containers don't stay here for more than a week," he tells me. "Two-thirds leave within a few days. About 16% don't even stay here overnight."

Yeah, yeah. Did you also know that if you lay 20 million containers end to end, they stretch more than three times around the globe? Or that refrigerated containers last year transported 57 million tons of merchandise? "That's almost the weight of two million whales!" notes a PSA brochure. And guess how many containers PSA loses, misplaces or damages every year? Fewer than 10. It makes you wonder how airports got so good at losing our luggage.

Make no mistake: running the world's busiest port is a serious business. Singapore sits at the mouth of arguably the most important sea lane on earth, the Malacca Strait. Some 50,000 ships pass through it every year, carrying a third of the world's trade and half its oil supplies. Linking the Indian Ocean with the Pacific, the Strait is a choke point where global trade, geopolitics and lawless seas all intersect. The Strait's security is vital not just to the three countries that flank it—Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia—but to emerging giants India and China, and to the countries who buy their goods. In other words, to all of us.

For centuries, great maritime cultures have met and mingled in the Malacca Strait. Dependable monsoon winds drove pioneering merchants between India and China, and were a closely guarded secret in Marco Polo's age. He sailed home through the Strait in 1292 after 17 years in Kublai Khan's court, and spent five months in a fortified stockade on the Indonesian landmass of Sumatra, waiting for the winds to change. Polo, his father and his uncle eventually headed home in a convoy of ships carrying 600 people. It was ravaged by pirate attacks, and after 18 months at sea only 18 survived. The Polos arrived in Venice "clad in tattered Tartar clothes," writes the scholar Frances Wood, "ragged and unrecognizable, bereft of all possessions save rubies and emeralds sewn into the seams of their tattered garments."

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