Is the Sulalatus-Salatin, or the Malay Annals/Sejarah Melayuas Stamford Raffles and John Leyden have popularized the text, an anecdotal history of the Melaka and Johor sultanates, in perhaps ways not too different from Charles Buckley's 1902 Anecdotal History of Old Times in Singapore, which is still referred to today? Or is the Sulalatus-Salatin a literary text to be read and interpreted within the genres of Malay literature and literary structures for these differing genres of literature? Winstedt led a pioneering generation of scholars to historically differentiate these genres of Malay literature evolving from folk literature through Hinduand Javanese-influenced genres to culminate in Islamic literature, and sought to read the Sulalatus-Salatin as a historical chronicle. Today we are breaking away from Winstedt's search for “objective vocabulary”in the Malay literary texts to studying the structuralist poetics of Malay literature and reconstructing the literary systems framing classical Malay literature.

This note assumes the historicity of Melaka's founding by Iskandar Shah as claimed in the Sulalatus-Salatin, and that he is identical with the Paramjçura the Portuguese recorded as the founder of the city they conquered, and the Pai-li-mi-su-la who the Ming records state lead a mission to China in 1411. The issue of this note is how were the circumstances of Melaka's founding by Iskandar Shah to be recollected and recorded in the Sulalatus-Salatin? Could the tragic beginning of Melaka—which Alfonso de Albuquerque and other Portuguese officials learnt from their local informants, that the city they conquered was established by a renegade prince, a Paramjçura, who fled his home Palembang after an abortive rebellion against his Javanese overlords and sought refuge in Temasek, where he assassinated his host, and had to again flee—be an auspicious start for a rising Melaka?

The narrator of what was to become the Sulalatus-Salatin had the challenging task of writing contemporary history that he and his listeners experienced or would be aware of some thirty years earlier. The first six chapters of the Sulalatus-Salatin are therefore read as an intent to rectify this tragic beginning of Melaka with a more befitting genealogy for the founder of Melaka and his descendants.

Often, when we survey the indigenous sources on the founding of port-settlements and polities in the region of the Melaka Straits, we are given the impression that human agency was the prime factor that resulted in their rise and decline. While the important role of human agency cannot be denied, it is crucial for us to also consider the role of exogenous factors in creating the conditions necessary for the creation of the required geopolitical contexts for urban generation and the state formational process to occur. This is particularly so for small port-settlements and port-polities in the Melaka Straits. What were the regional circumstances that allowed for localized autonomy to be viable and the opportunity for sufficient economic self-sustainability to be developed in these settlements, especially Temasek?

Exogenous forces were, however, not confined solely to political vicissitudes at the regional and international levels. Environmental events, the occurrences of which were often beyond the control of humans but which had an impact on human activities and historical trajectories, also affected the rise and demise of port-polities in the Melaka Straits region. What were the environmental factors of the first half of the second millennium ce that affected the fortunes of Temasek?

Finally, given the role of macro-level forces and environmental factors in the fortunes of port-settlements and polities in the Straits region, it is not difficult to expect that these exogenous factors would have played a part in generating the identity and culture of the portpolities in question. What, then, were the external influences on Temasek's culture and identity?

The present essay seeks to discuss the above three issues and the role they played in the formation, establishment and demise of Temasek during the late thirteenth century through to the early fifteenth century.

Regional Forces in Maritime Asia and the Rise of Temasek

While port settlements of the Melaka Straits region were externally oriented, their respective locations determined to a large extent the direction of that orientation. Settlements in the north Melaka Straits region, for example, were generally oriented towards the Bay of Bengal and the Indian subcontinent

With no reported shipwrecks in Singapore waters, we must draw on archaeological evidence from surrounding seas along with historical sources to investigate the wide range of ships that once called here. Apart from the European square riggers, it turns out that the eclectic mix of vessels anchored off the Singapore River during Raffles's early years, as depicted in paintings held in the National Museum (fig. 4.1), would not have differed much from the shipping of five centuries earlier. While numbers and makeup fluctuated with Singapore's changing status and with developments far afield, the diversity of shipping would have been maintained beyond fourteenth-century Temasek to at least the end of the seventeenth century.

Perhaps the earliest relevant archaeological discovery within this defined pre-colonial period is the Nipa Shoal Wreck. Nipa Shoal lies less than ten kilometres to the west of Raffles Lighthouse, within Indonesian territorial waters. The original finder, Warren Blake, donated most of the recovered artefacts to the National Museum. They include Longquan celadon dishes, stoneware jars and thousands of Chinese copper coins, the most recent providing an earliest possible wrecking date of 1258. The oldest coin dates to 762, illustrating the remarkable longevity of Chinese coin utilization, and implying that the actual wrecking date could be decades after 1258; the Longquan celedon suggests the late thirteenth century or beyond. Unfortunately, no hull remains were found. It is impossible to determine whether this ship had traded at the fledgling Temasek port before running afoul of the rocks as she journeyed further west. If she did, it is perhaps more likely that she was a Southeast Asian ship involved in the entrepôt trade. If she did not, she could have been a Chinese junk transiting the Singapore Strait during the northeast monsoon.

The Jade Dragon Wreck sank around the same time as the Nipa Shoal Wreck and with the same type of cargo, but off the northernmost tip of Borneo. Unfortunately, the site was looted before archaeological intervention; however, hull remains confirm that the ship was of the Southeast Asian lashed-lug tradition. Planks were carved to shape and incorporated perforated lugs to which frames were lashed with ijok(sugar palm fibre).

Archaeological research began in Singapore in 1984. Since then, over half a million artefacts have been recovered from systematic excavations. These remains fall into two periods: the Temasek era (fourteenth to sixteenth century) and the Singapore era (1819 to the present). Historical sources from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries demonstrate that during this time Singapore was still a source of maritime manpower for rulers vying to control the local waterways, and that ships took on provisions here, but the only artefacts on land that date from this 200- year period are two ceramic sherds excavated at St. Andrew's Cathedral.

The artefacts from excavations are reliable proof that Singapore was home to a sophisticated multicultural society with a complex set of links to local and long-distance trade before 1350. Although these basic outlines of ancient Singapore are now clear, there are still important questions about Singapore's history that further research, including work in laboratories and archives, may be able to answer. The important questions concern the provenance of artefacts, many of which were not made locally but were imported; the nature of Singapore's ancient ecology and environment; reconstruction of artefacts; statistical analysis of intra-site variation; and comparisons with other sites in the region.

Texts, Legends and Surface Finds

The Malay Annals

The pre-colonial artefacts from Singapore confirm the hypothesis that Singapore in the fourteenth century corresponded closely to the way it was depicted in the Malay Annals as a bustling multi-ethnic port. The Malay Annalsare not entirely reliable as a historical source; they were compiled for a political purpose, to support the claims of the Malay royal family who ruled Melaka in the mid-fifteenth century, when Islam replaced esoteric Buddhism as the main religion in the court. Numerous recensions of the Malay Annalsexist; the oldest version, and the one probably closest to the original, is known as the Raffles MS 18. This was composed in Johor in the early seventeenth century, apparently just after Singapore had been devastated by an attack by Aceh. The composer himself may have been a Singaporean; this would account for the fact that the first sections glorify Singapore as the first great Malay trading port.

There is ample archaeological evidence today to argue that the island of Singapore was a trading port of significant importance from the fourteenth century, and perhaps earlier. This archaeological evidence has been accumulated over the decades from Singapore's very first archaeological dig in 1984 at Fort Canning Hill to the current work of the Archaeology Unit at the ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute. However, public interest in Singapore's pre-modern history is very much a recent phenomenon. For one, until recently historians paid very little attention to the island's pre-modern histories. As Kwa Chong Guan informs us in his first chapter in this volume, seminal texts like Mary Turnbull's A History of Singapore, 1819–1975 did little to try to understand Singapore as a pre-1819 regional port or see it as part of the larger Malay world. Kwa notes that this was because there was either insufficient evidence of pre-1819 communities for serious investigation or that these communities were not believed to be significant enough to justify studying. Much of the writing of national histories in Southeast Asia took colonialism as the starting point and embarked on a chronology that included post–World War II decolonization, the emergence of postcolonial governments and their struggles to build new nations during the Cold War. Pre-modern empires, sea-faring communities and border-crossing fishermen did not command the same attention as newly formed nation-states, authoritarian governments and developing economies.

The other reason for the lack of interest in Singapore's pre-modern histories was decidedly ideological. Upon expulsion from Malaysia in 1965, Singapore's multicultural society made it politically untenable for its national history to be hitched to the civilization and culture of any particular ethnic group. With multiculturalism and meritocracy as its pillars, it would have been contradictory to equate national identity and culture with the country's largest ethnic community. In cutting the Gordian knot, the postcolonial government decided that the arrival of Sir Stamford Raffles to establish a British Station on Singapore would be ground zero without appeal to any ethnic culture. For many generations of Singaporeans, Singapore was born as a modern entity, transformed from the proverbial quiet fishing village to a colonial entrepôt with the stroke of a pen on 6 February 1819. This popular version of history was a strategic rupture, effectively dislocating the island from its surroundings and region, to introduce the island as tabula rasa.

Fast forward fifty years and the external environment has changed. Today the rise of China has made regionalism and sub-regionalism in Southeast Asia more geopolitically crucial than ever before.

In order to understand the nature of a city, it is necessary to understand its founding moment, according to classicists. The traditional account of the founding of pre-colonial Singapura is famously related in the Sejarah Melayuliterature. Prince Sang Nila Utama sailed to the coast of Temasek, glimpsed a powerful beast there—likened to a lion by bystanders—and was inspired to build “Lion City”. Two points will be made here regarding the significance of this often misunderstood episode. Firstly, the city was founded at a place and time that show it to have intruded on a community existing nearby. Secondly, the city's rulers justified their legitimacy by drawing on the South Asian trope of an animal that reveals a charmed place for a settlement.

Temasek's Geographic and Temporal Extent

The traditional account of Singapore's founding leaves out an important part of the picture: people were already living on the island. It is well known that Singapura was founded in a place called Temasek, but here it will be argued that Temasek had its own pre-existing settlement, which was not much older than the new city. What does Temasek include, and when and why did it become known by that name?

There is no record of Temasek before the year 1225, when Zhao Rukuo wrote about a place called Lengga Entrance 凌牙门 (foreign terms transcribed on voyages from Fujian are conveyed here in Hokkien pronunciation). This trading post is usually identified with the Lengga Entrance 龙牙门, Longyamen, documented in 1350 in Wang Dayuan's Description of the Barbarians of the Isles. Wang's statement that this place is occupied by natives of Temasek (Tanmasek 单马锡) allows it to be recognized as the western entrance of Telok Blangah, present-day Keppel Harbour. The entrance was once marked by a tall sea stack, resembling a lingga, which is presumably the basis for the name Lengga. This is the place where Sang Nila Utama came ashore, according to tradition, after losing his crown on the sea journey from Batam. According to Zhao, it would have been a thriving shipping lane for decades before Sang Nila Utama arrived in the 1290s. But this is not where the prince has his fateful animal encounter and builds a city. That takes place at Kuala Temasek and the Padang, the present-day Fort Canning and Civic District area, a good distance from Telok Blangah (fig. 7.1).

The Malay Annals narrate how Sri Tribuana, sailing towards the land of Temasek that he espied while out hunting, was caught in a storm that threatened to wreck his ship. The crew could not bale the water out fast enough and the ship was in danger of being wrecked. Sri Tribuana was asked to throw his heavy crown overboard to lighten the ship. This he did, and the storm abated. The symbolism of this avoidance of shipwreck has not been satisfactorily explained. This essay searches for this symbolism of the avoidance of shipwrecks in Buddhist narratives of maritime crossings.

Seafaring Monks in Maritime Asia

The spread of Buddhism from the Indian Subcontinent to Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia and China via the maritime routes goes back at least to the early centuries of the current era. Historical evidence records a steady traffic of monks travelling both eastwards and westwards along the sea routes linking the swathe of territory between the Indian Subcontinent and Japan. Written and material evidence becomes substantial from the fifth century onwards, testifying to an efflorescence of long-distance maritime contacts across Maritime Asia. This vast geographical expanse of sea and land, largely coinciding with a trans-regional “Buddhist Cosmopolis”, became the natural theatre for the journeys of hundreds of travelling monks who crossed the seas far and wide in search of texts, teachers and patrons. The vehicles of their travels were the Monsoondriven merchant ships that plied the maritime routes connecting a web of entrepôts linking the Indian Ocean to the China Sea, carrying— alongside their valuable cargos—pilgrims, diplomats and religious personalities of disparate affiliations.

Most of the monks travelling in both directions between India and China preferred the maritime route to the overland one, or at least sought to include a maritime leg in their journey, which usually included stopovers in Sri Lanka and the Malay-Indonesian Archipelago. Maritime mobility of Buddhist agents, besides being numerically significant, was also quicker and easier than hitherto assumed. In spite of this, both the Jataka tales and the Sino-Japanese and Tibetan biographies of monks travelling from China to India or vice-versa make clear that travel across the maritime trading channels linking the two regions was not devoid of perils.

At the ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute, visitors are greeted by a large wooden engraved navigation chart of Zheng He's voyages displayed on the wall along the corridor, near the front entrance. George Phillips (1836–96), the British Consul at Fuzhou, in Fujian province, published a paper on this navigational chart he found in the book Wu-pei-pi-shu《武备秘书》. He named it Ching Ho's Chart, while J.V.G. Mills called it the Mao Kun Map. The map contains four pages of stellar diagrams and thirty-four places with stellar altitudes, all in India or kingdoms west of India. The Ching Ho Chart/Mao Kun Map is thought to be the earliest Chinese map that depicts Southern Asia, Persia, Arabia and East Africa in an adequate manner, and is particularly important to Singapore as it mentions Danmaxi (Temasek).

How was the map used for navigation? One method to determine the distance a person is standing away from you (commonly used by men who have undergone national service in Singapore) is to stretch out the arm and point the thumb upwards to measure the height of the person. If the person appears about the height of a thumb nail, the distance is approximately a hundred metres. Celestial navigation uses the same principle but measures the stellar altitudes in order to determine location. For example, in order to find the latitude of a position in the Northern Hemisphere, the higher the North Star (Polaris) appears from the horizon, the higher the latitude.

The Stellar Diagram No. 1 (fig. 10.1) depicts the route from Deogarh in India to Hormuz in Persia. In the introduction to Stellar Diagram No. 1 it says:

Singapore commemorated the bicentennial of Thomas Stamford Raffles's establishment of a British station on this island with a yearlong series of blockbuster exhibitions and accompanying international conferences and ground-up events involving community and volunteer efforts. In contrast to the centennial of Raffles's arrival in Singapore, which was a celebration of the achievements of the Crown Colony that had grown out of the British station Raffles established, the bicentennial was a commemoration inviting Singaporeans to reflect on the two hundred years of their island's past in the long cycles of the preceding five hundred years of time. For many, this invitation was a challenge, as the prevailing and dominant public narrative of Singapore was that it had only a two-hundred-year history.

This template of Singapore having a two-hundred-year history started by Raffles was laid down by Raffles himself. On 8 January 1819, Raffles reported to Governor-General Hastings that his inquiries at Pinang indicated that Singapore “has been deserted for Centuries and long before the Dutch power existed in these Seas”. British colonial officials from Dr John Crawfurd (1783–1868) have confirmed this. The template was consolidated by generations of historians, from Raffles Professor of History Kennedy G. Tregonning and his colleagues at the History Department of the old University of Singapore in the 1960s through to the 1990s.

Crawfurd, as the second Resident of Singapore after William Farquhar, would be in a position to authoritatively state that “for a period of about five centuries and a half, there is no record of Singapore having been occupied, and it was only the occasional resort of pirates. In that year [1811], it was taken possession of by the party from whom we [the British] first received it, an officer of the government of Johore called the Tumângung. This person told me himself that he came there with about 150 followers, a few months before the British expedition which afterwards captured Java passed the island, and this happened in the summer of 1811.”

L.A. Mills was the first to establish the founding of Singapore as the beginning of a history of British Malaya, 1824–67.

This essay aims to provide a synopsis of the different types of sources that are available for the study of the history of Singapore in the period before circa 1800. The objective is not to provide a reconstruction of Singapore history as such, but rather to provide general comments and analyse the sources at hand. This chapter offers an opportunity to step back and share with you the experience I have gathered in identifying, handling and working with different types of sources over the past two decades. In this chapter I will take a closer look at what those different types of sources are able to inform, what their limitations are, and what they generally do not tell us. As the title suggests, the focus of the present expose is placed on Portuguese and Dutch textual materials broadly defined. This includes manuscript and published sources as well as cartographic specimens that touch on the island of Singapore, its surrounding waters, and the southern stretches of the Malay Peninsula.

Clearly, I am aware that I am not the first to work on these materials, specifically on Portuguese texts. Investigations were already conducted in the 1950s by Ian Alastair Macgregor at the History Department of the University of Singapore. Almost concurrently, Carl Alexander Gibson-Hill, the former director of the Raffles Museum of Singapore, was studying archaeological evidence, published travelogues and historical cartography. These two researchers made important contributions to the study at that point in time when access to primary sources dating from the early modern period (either in printed form or manuscript) was far more cumbersome and limited than it is today. Much later, in the 1990s, Paulo Pinto published a study, first in Portuguese and later in an updated English translation. He has mined the Portuguese sources to explore the relationship of the Portuguese with Aceh and Johor during the second half of the sixteenth and the opening two decades of the seventeenth centuries. This latter work, however, does not substantially touch on Singapore, and has failed to take into consideration certain Dutch and German language documents from the period under review. Its value is therefore somewhat limited.

The Orang Laut played a significant role in the history of the Straits. This area is centred on the Straits of Melaka and the islands, the seas and the straits at the northern and southern entrances of the Straits and at the southernmost end of the South China Sea. This world or Realm of the Straits (Negara Selat) gained prominence because of the vibrant east–west international maritime trade between Europe, the Middle East, India and Sri Lanka in the west and China, Japan, Korea and the Ryukyu Islands in the east. Southeast Asia lay athwart this trading lane, with the Straits of Melaka being the only known passageway for centuries. Even after the Sunda Straits between Java and Sumatra came to be used increasingly after the sixteenth century, the Straits of Melaka continued to be the most travelled maritime route through Southeast Asia. The waters of the Straits were generally calm, and the mountain chains running along both spines of Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula provided all-year protection from the annual northeast and southwest monsoon winds. Before entering and leaving the southern end of the Straits of Melaka, ships had to cross a dangerous stretch of waters from the southeastern coast of Sumatra to Singapore, the Riau-Lingga Archipelagos and the islands and straits of the southern end of the South China Sea. For this reason, the entire area was considered to be a single maritime unit and came to be referred to simply as “the Sea” or “the Straits”.

In the Raffles MS 18 version of the Sulalatus-Salatin, more commonly known as the Sejarah Melayu or Malay Annals, the Malay word “Laut” or sea is the term used for this maritime space. When the Palembang lord Sri Tribuana decided to leave permanently to go abroad, he said to his minister: “I want to go to the Sea (Laut) to look for a good place so I can build a settlement (hendak berankgkat ke Laut, hendak mencari tempat yang baik hendak beta perbuatkan negeri).” Once he left Palembang he crossed over to the Sepat Straits and from the Sepat Straits to the Sambar Straits.