Former Raffles Professor of History Wong Lin Ken commented that none of his colleagues has been able to explain the absence of any port on Singapore before Raffles arrived to establish one. The implicit assumption underlying Wong's comment is that there should have been a settlement or port on Singapore because of its strategic location on the sailing and trading routes connecting the South China Sea and the Bay of Bengal. This essay attempts to connect the fragmentary evidence not available to the late Prof Wong and his colleagues to reconstruct a port settlement in the Kallang Estuary from the late sixteenth through much of the seventeenth century.

D’Erédia's 1604 Map

One of the maps drawn by the Portuguese-Malayan explorer (or descobridor, as he is described in contemporary accounts), cartographer and mathematician Manoel Godinho de Erédia in his Declaram de Malaca e India Meridional com o Cathay (Description of Melaka, Meridional India and Cathay) about his travels in the region at the beginning of the seventeenth century is of the Straits of Singapore. It is unlikely de Eredia visited Singapore, but his map was based on information available to him.

The map, entitled “Chorographic description of the Straits of Sincapura and Sabban, 1604 a.d.”, is oriented with Johor at the bottom of the map and Sumatra at the top. The map identifies several features on the east coast of “Sincapura”. The northernmost feature identified is Tanjong Rusa, south of which are Tanah Merah, Sungei Bedok, Tanjong Rhu and a “Xabandaria”, respectively. Tanjong Rusa refers to Changi Point today and may take its name from the shoals off its coast that were once known as Běting Kusah or Tanion Rusa, as Erédia marked it in his map. Tanah Merah refers to the red-orange weathered lateritic cliffs along the coast (which have been levelled today). They were a prominent landmark for navigators and pilots up to the nineteenth century.

It is similarly marked as “Red cliffs” in James Horsburg's 1806 chart of “Singapore and Malacca”. Later sea charts distinguish between the “Red Cliffs” of Tanah Merah and Bedok. Other early maps of Singapore transcribed this old Malay place name as “Badok”—in the vicinity of the “small red cliff ”.

The National Heritage Board (NHB) and the ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute announced on 16 June 2021 the successful archaeological excavation of two historic shipwrecks in the eastern approaches to Singapore's waters. The first shipwreck was discovered in 2015 in the course of salvage work on a barge that had run aground on a prominent rock outcrop known for more than a millennium as a major hazard to mariners approaching the Strait of Singapore. The National Heritage Board commissioned the Archaeology Unit of the ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute to investigate and then excavate the wreck in 2016. This wreck, intermittently excavated for the next three years, has now been identified from its cargo of Chinese ceramics to be a fourteenth-century vessel most likely headed for Temasek, and therefore named the Temasek Wreck.

A survey and search of the vicinity for other wrecks, commissioned in mid-2019, found a second wreck, which was excavated over the next two years. The second shipwreck has been identified from archival research as an eighteenth-century merchant ship, the Shah Muncher, which was commissioned and owned by the Bombay trader and ship owner Sorabjee Muncherjee Readymoney. It was built in India in 1789 and sank on its return voyage from China to India in 1796 with a diverse cargo of Chinese ceramics and other non-ceramic trade items ranging from glass to copper-alloy objects and umbrellas. There would have been other trade commodities, especially tea, which would have perished. At a thousand tonnes the Shah Muncher was similar in size to the larger East India Company (EIC) ships sailing between England and China.

The essays in this book provide the context of these two wrecks and their implications for our understanding of Singapore history. The two lead essays describing the wrecks and locating them in the context of other contemporary shipwrecks are by Michael Flecker, who brought thirty years of experience and expertise as a marine archaeologist to the excavation of these two shipwrecks. His essays here are summaries of more detailed preliminary reports published by the ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute.

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.

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.

Among the colonial institutions that Singapore inherited with independence on 9 August 1965 was the Raffl es Museum, established in 1849. It moved to its present building with its iconic dome (now a gazetted historic building) in 1887 and became a repository of colonial knowledge of the natural history, ethnography and archaeology of the Malay world especially the peninsula. But the People's Action Party government had other more pressing priorities for Singapore's economic, political and security survival in 1965 than deciding on the future of an old colonial museum. It was only in 1984, with Singapore's survival assured, that the government started to refl ect with confidence on Singapore's past in a major exhibition on 25 years of nationhood since 1959. Concurrently, the old Raffl es Museum, now renamed the National Museum, started installing a new series of exhibits tracing Singapore's journey to nationhood.

A Long-Term Vision for the Museum

In December 1986, then minister for community development Mr Wong Kan Seng appointed a task force to draw up long-term plans for the development of the museum. This task force was chaired by Mr Tay Kheng Soon, a pioneering architect deeply concerned with Singapore's urban heritage and history. The task force's primary recommendation was that the museum should make a radical break from its traditional image of being a treasure house full of butterflies, stuffed animals and strange smells, and especially the whale skeleton hanging from the ceiling.