The Lion City's Glorious Past
The founding mythology of this city-state was once thought to be pure fiction—archaeology says otherwise
By Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar
Monday, October 16, 2017
This 2015 rescue excavation (seen from above) took place in front of the Victoria Theatre and Concert Hall at Singapore’s Empress Place. Lasting 100 days, the dig recovered nearly 4 tons of material, helped establish Singapore’s role as a major port, known as Temasek, that engaged in brisk trade with China and other nations in the 14th century.
In 1817, Sir Stamford Raffles, the governor of the British colony of Bencoolen in Sumatra, set off to find a suitable port site in the Strait of Melaka, a narrow channel in the Malay-Indonesian archipelago that connects the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. Situated at the junction of two monsoons, the strait necessitated a long layover for ships dependent on seasonal winds. The region’s premier entrepôt at the time was Dutch-controlled Melaka, where traders from Arabia and India would stop over until the next monsoon wind took them farther north to China, or back south laden with silks and spices. The opium trade with China was growing, and Raffles was determined to build a British base in the region. In 1819, he lit upon a small island at the southern end of the strait, off the tip of Malaysia—an unremarkable settlement that he nonetheless believed was both strategically located and possessed of a glorious history.
https://www.archaeology.org/issues/278-1711/letter-from/5998-letter-from-singapore
