On 18 May 2015, marine salvage master Mr Ramdzan Salim informed our Archaeology Unit (AU) about a possible historic shipwreck he had found during salvage work on a capsized barge in the vicinity of Pedra Branca. In his email were photographs of coral-encrusted green plates that he had recovered from the seabed. Dr Michael Flecker and the staff of the AU had no difficulty identifying the coral-encrusted plates as fourteenth-century celadon plates from the Longquan kilns in Zhejiang Province, China. Our AU colleagues met Mr Salim and one of his divers on 22 May to confirm the finds and its location.

A year-long process of discussions and planning with the National Heritage Board (NHB) followed before an exploratory survey was launched to confirm that the recovered Chinese celadons were part of the cargo of a ship that had sunk in the vicinity of Pedra Branca. Thereafter the NHB commissioned the AU to undertake the excavation of the wreck over the next three years.

Dr Flecker's essay in this volume summarizes the results of this three-year archaeological excavation of the shipwreck, which recovered some four tonnes of Chinese ceramics. A follow-up survey of the vicinity located another shipwreck, which was excavated from 2019 to 2021 and has been identified as an eighteenth-century country trader.

The essays in this book by Temasek History Research Centre (THRC) alumni are the first to provide a historical context of these two shipwrecks since the public announcement of their discovery on 16 June 2021. These essays developed from presentations at a THRC webinar on these two shipwrecks in early April 2022. I would like to thank my colleagues for accepting our invitation to share their preliminary ideas on these two wrecks with a wider audience.

The excavation of these two historic shipwrecks was the most complex and longest archaeological investigation undertaken by the AU since its establishment in 2010. To be sure, archaeological excavations in Singapore began relatively late, in 1984 on Fort Canning. Thus far, the AU has undertaken excavations at Fort Canning Hill, Empress Place, Adam Park, the National Gallery Singapore and the Victoria Memorial Hall.

Singapore’s home affairs and law minister, K. Shanmugam, is generally an unflappable man. Yet, twice in 2021, his composure appeared to be affected by a series of racially inflected incidents that captured the public’s attention. The first was on 6 June when he expressed that he was “not so sure anymore” that Singapore was “moving in the right direction on racial tolerance and harmony”. His remarks were triggered by a viral Facebook video of a Chinese Singaporean man berating a young couple for their interracial relationship. In the clip, the man—later identified as a sixty-year-old local polytechnic lecturer—told them that that it was “racist that an Indian prey on Chinese girl”, while insisting that people should only date within their own race. (Shanmugam sounded more optimistic four days later, however, when he asserted in an interview that Singapore has made “tremendous progress” as a multiracial country.) Just over a month later, the minister conveyed that he was “quite sad” to hear a particular question raised during a forum co-organized by the government’s feedback unit and Lianhe Zaobao, Singapore’s main Chinese language broadsheet. An attendee had asked why the Chinese community—the country’s largest ethnic group—“shouldn’t have the right to decide on Singapore’s direction, such as education, [and] language”, instead of having to defer to ethnic minorities.

These events were not isolated. Accounts circulated in social media through the year about racial incidents. An ethnic Chinese lady was filmed repeatedly hitting a gong in front of her Hindu neighbour’s door while the latter was conducting his “five-minute, twice-a-week” ritual prayers (which involved ringing a small bell). There were two separate racist incidents against ethnic Indians in the first week of May alone: the first involved a man making offensive remarks at an Indian family after confronting one of them for not wearing a mask, while the second involved an assault against a fifty-five-year-old Singaporean Indian lady who had worn her mask below her nose while brisk walking.

These incidents arose despite the country’s heavy emphasis on the ethos of multiculturalism and the numerous laws regulating racial harmony. The Singapore government has certainly not been shy in resorting to legal sanction when necessary to penalize offensive speech, including relying on the colonial-era Sedition Act (originally introduced to safeguard British rule from local anti-imperial resistance) in the 2000s and early 2010s.

The character of immigration is often shaped by the conditions of departure. Why and how people leave their country, as well as the state of the country they leave behind, influence their attitudes and the relations they share with host societies. In the case of Southeast Asia, Chinese immigration over the centuries has been characterized by different levels of settlement and integration. There have generally been four waves of Chinese immigration into the region. The first wave saw scattered flows of Chinese merchants and traders between the tenth and fifteenth centuries into parts of Southeast Asia such as Sumatra, Cambodia and Campa, and later, Malacca from the fifteenth century. Many of these merchants and traders settled down to marry local women and integrated into local communities.

The second wave was triggered by conflict, wars, starvation, and corruption in the hinterland from the nineteenth century to 1949. This wave, also known as the “coolie pattern”, was made up of “large numbers of coolie labour, normally men of peasant origin, landless labourers and the urban poor” (Wang 1991, p. 8). During this wave, many migrants spread to different parts of the globe, including the United States, Canada, Latin America, Australia, Malaya and Indonesia, less as traders and merchants but more as indentured slaves and coolies to provide menial labour. Again, like the previous wave, many did not return to China but instead settled down in their destination countries and, in the case of Southeast Asia, to engage in the struggle to be recognized as members of newly formed nations. These waves of Chinese immigration came at a time when China was not the power it is today. Centuries of economic insulation and the ‘100 years of humiliation’ during which China was subjugated to Western powers, together with famines and war, had shaped the character of Chinese immigration and the way immigrants engaged and settled in host societies.

China’s 1978 open-door policy kick-started the third wave in Chinese immigration. Seen by some as the ‘New Chinese Migration’ (Wong 2012), this wave differed in scope and character from the previous two waves.

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.

Dementia is an increasing challenge across the globe. The 2015 World Alzheimer Report by Alzheimer’s Disease International describes the global impact of dementia, which is summarized below (Prince et al., 2015). The prevalence of dementia is increasing worldwide with 47 million people with dementia in 2015, estimated to rise to 131 million by 2050. Dementia is the leading contributor to disability and need for care in older people, with a population-attributable fraction of 25% for disability. In people aged over 60 years globally, dementia is the ninth leading cause of Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) lost and the eighth leading case of Years Lived with Disability. The global cost of dementia in 2015 was estimated to be US$818 billion. The rate of population ageing is relatively greater in low- to middle-income countries and this is compounded by a relative lack of resources. As a result, low- to middle-income countries will be impacted more dramatically by dementia compared to high-income countries. A recent review and accompanying editorial has concluded with ‘a call to action’ for greater research attention to the impact of sex in Alzheimer’s disease to help improve outcomes with an acknowledgment that insufficient attention has hitherto been paid to sex-specific issues in dementia more broadly (Mielke et al., 2018 and Nebel et al., 2018). This chapter provides an overview of dementia, with a focus on males.

In 1959, Aguedo F. Agbayani of Pangasinan introduced to the Philippine Congress a bill “designed to prevent the growth of the power and influence of the military in this country, in order to spare our country from the tragic experiences of our Asian neighbors, recently in Burma and Thailand, where military dictatorship has marred their beautiful history” (Republic of the Philippines, House Bill 2220 [1959], quoted in Berlin 2008, p. 97).

Congressman Agbayani evidently had the keen sense of connections between the Philippines and the rest of Asia not uncommon among his countrymen in the post-war period. His reference to Burma, today's Myanmar, concerned the military's non-violent assumption of power in the country in October of the preceding year and to Chief of the General Staff Ne Win's consequent service as premier at the head of a “caretaker government” (Nakanishi 2013, pp. 84–88). In Thailand, Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat had staged coups d’état in September 1957 and again in October 1958 (Thak 2007, pp. 78–80). Of course, Agbayani could not know that, following elections in early 1960, Ne Win would return power to a civilian government in Rangoon, only to mount a coup of his own in March 1962 and thus to initiate long-term military control of Burma, or that military rule in Bangkok was destined to last another fourteen years, until October 1973. These developments and their legacies account for the publication of the present volume, treating the same two states whose examples troubled Aguedo Agbayani sixty years ago.

The late Donald Berlin called attention to the congressman's 1959 bill in his landmark study of civil-military relations in the Philippines during the decades preceding President Ferdinand E. Marcos's declaration of martial law in September 1972 (Berlin 2008). It was the contention of that study that—contrary to received wisdom, despite the absence of direct military control of the government in Manila, but very much as in other Southeast Asian states and societies—“military influence in Philippine state and society historically ha[d] been substantial” (Berlin 2008, p. 140). At the same time, the specific forms of that influence during the 1946–72 period proved varied.

INTRODUCTION

In 2009 a group of local Christian women mounted a challenge to the leadership of women's rights group, AWARE, and subsequently took control of it. They did so because they had felt that the non-governmental organization (NGO) had strayed from its original objective to champion gender equality in the workforce and, instead, actively promoted homosexuality and lesbianism amongst the young. Not only did the takeover spark a national controversy, it also marked the coming of age of Christian activism in Singapore. The Christian takeover was neither by force nor underhanded means but transparently through institutional procedures. Armed with knowledge of the NGO's constitution and election process, the Christian women simply encouraged their supporters to sign up as members who then became eligible to vote in their preferred candidates to the top posts. The incident showed that, in addition to the usual reactive routines like online petitions or indignant letters to the press, the Singaporean Christian community had now accumulated the will and the know-how for concrete action when it came to advancing their moral values. This was a resolutely middle-class Christian feat.

The expansion of the Singapore middle class began in the 1980s. After decades of industrialization and strong economic growth, aided by favourable geopolitical conditions, this emerging middle class began to demonstrate typical characteristics such as mass consumption, the pursuit of intellectual and leisure activities, as well as greater purchasing power. Accompanying the growth of the Singapore middle class was that of the Christian community. This community grew from 14.6 per cent in 2000 to 18.8 per cent in 2015, making it one of the fastest growing faiths in Singapore. In 2010, there were 350,000 Protestant and 219,000 Catholics, although these figures would have increased by now. More pertinent to this chapter, studies have shown Singaporean Christians to be overrepresented in the middle class. For example, Singaporean Christians are well educated with 32 per cent holding a university degree, more than any other religious community. Singaporean Christians are also more likely than any other religious community to live in private or landed property.