Standing at the beach in East Coast Park, the eye is struck immediately by the huge ocean liners and cargo ships anchored out at sea as far as the horizon. On an exceptionally clear day it is possible to see as far as Batam, just across the Singapore Strait. At night, the lights from the ships come on, like shimmering little bonfires dotting the line of water. From land, this is an image of idyllic calm and irrepressible peace, with the sound of the waves taking one far from the chaos and bustle of the city. Yet this image is deceptive. Unless one has spent time at sea, it would not be immediately apparent that the reality is far less irenic and immutable. Indeed, for much of Singapore's history, the waters in and around the island had an unsavoury reputation as a place of danger and death. Traversing the Singapore Straits in the past often tested the mettle of a captain, and recounting this experience of the voyage formed a favourite subject in tales and lore, many of which have been forgotten today. The aim of this essay therefore is to provide a short history of sailing past Singapore, to familiarize those on terra firma with the four different waterways that sailors used and the incipient dangers they faced when navigating past the island before the modern era. This brief overview will equip the reader with a more seaward perspective and help to locate Singapore's arteries within a larger maritime framework.

Defining the Singapore Straits

The Singapore Strait (singular) is a body of water situated south of the Island of Singapore, separating the tip of the Malay Peninsula from the islands of Riau. Running approximately 113 kilometres in length, it includes small islands and reefs and merges, from west to east, the Melaka Strait and the Karimata Strait with the South China Sea. Today, the narrowest navigable part of the strait is between Singapore's southernmost island, Pulau Satumu, and Indonesia's Pulau Takong Besar, which is a distance of a mere 5.2 kilometres. Its widest point, by contrast, measures some 20 kilometres, between Malaysia's Tanjong Rumania and Bintan, of Indonesia's Riau Islands archipelago.

The Shah Muncher was a British country trader that was on its return voyage in 1796 from China to Bombay when it sank off the rocky outcropping of Pedra Branca. The British port of Singapore had of course not then been founded, but it is well within the realm of possibility that the ship travelling westward intended to call at one of the nearby ports of the Singapore and Melaka Straits. This might have been Riau (approximately today's Tanjung Pinang) on the island of Bintan, or perhaps even Melaka, where the ship could have taken on fresh water and provisions before sailing on to India.

This chapter does not discuss the ship or its cargo as such, but rather outlines in broad strokes the economic and political context in which the Shah Muncher was operating. To this end, the temporal scope of this chapter straddles the eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries. It is perhaps opportune to define at this juncture the nature of the seaborne trade we are concerned with. What is country trade? And what is a country trader? Simply put, country trade refers to private trade within (or sometimes outside of) an established trading monopoly. European country trade in the Indian Ocean reaches back to the time of the earliest Portuguese explorers and adventurers at the turn of the 1400s and 1500s. But the most familiar monopoly would be the one held by the British East India Company based in London towards the modern period. Even though country trade could and did assume different forms, the term generally refers to private trade in certain commodities between specific ports. Linked to the country trade, the expression “country trader” then refers either to a natural person who carried out the trade, usually the captain or owner of the vessel who sailed under a particular national flag—in the specific case of the Shah Muncher it would refer to the British flag—or could otherwise refer to the entire ship. It should be stressed that private or country traders hailing from different parts of Europe became active in seaborne trade, especially in the Western Pacific and Indian Ocean during the second half of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

The state of scholarship on the pre-modern history of Singapore is rich. There has been a significant amount of research conducted, in particular, on the fourteenth century, or the Temasek period. These include almost four decades of archaeological excavations as well as a much longer tradition of textual analyses.

The discovery of the Temasek Wreck, a mid-fourteenth-century vessel that appears to have been on its way from South China to Southeast Asia when it foundered off what would eventually become the territorial waters of present-day Singapore, and which was possibly on its way to Temasek, appears at first glance to be a continuation of the research trajectory we are presently on. However, unlike the land-based excavation sites that continue to be opened, the discovery of this wreck, the first of its kind in Singapore waters, and in many ways the first of its kind in Southeast Asia, has the potential to expand our understanding of Singapore's pre-modern history in areas that scholars have hitherto not been able to embark upon.

This essay seeks to discuss the possibilities of new areas of research into the international history of Temasek, a late-thirteenth to early fifteenth-century port-polity centred on the north bank of the Singapore River. Specifically, it will explore the gaps in our current understanding of Temasek's international economy, its functions as a commercial port at the southern end of the Melaka Strait, its place in the larger Southeast Asian and Maritime East Asian world, and how data from the Temasek Wreck could potentially help to unlock these areas of research.

The State of Scholarship on the Pre-modern

International History of Temasek

Presently, historians have narrated Temasek as likely to have functioned as an international entrepôt serving as a trans-shipment hub for products coming from Southeast Asia, the Bay of Bengal littoral and South China Sea littoral. Historical texts and archaeological research indicate that a wide range of trade products, including Chinese ironware, ceramics and silks, flora material such as cotton, fauna products such as hornbill casques, and minerals such as tin and gold, were made available at Banzu—the main port of Temasek.

The fourteenth-century Temasek Wreck was excavated recently off Pedra Branca by the Archaeology Unit (AU) of the ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute (ISEAS) on behalf of the Singapore National Heritage Board (NHB). Details of the discovery, survey, excavation and outcomes are provided in the ISEAS publication Temasek Working Paper Series no. 4. Key findings, such as the cargo composition, date of loss, likely origin of the ship, probable port of lading and most likely destination are presented here, but not as stand-alone outcomes. The aim is to place the Temasek Wreck within the context of contemporary shipwrecks in this region in order to better understand the significance of early Singapore in the realm of regional maritime trade.

The Temasek Wreck

The Temasek Wreck was excavated intermittently from 2016 until 2019. Approximately 3.5 tonnes of ceramics were recovered, but little else. The ship itself had completely vanished. Without the anaerobic protection of deep and fine sediments, the hull has been scattered by waves and currents and consumed by Teredo worms.

While some intact examples have been retrieved, most of the ceramics are in the form of shards. Stoneware storage jars and smallmouth jars—most likely from Cizao—Longquan celadon dishes, bowls and jars and qingbai ware from Jingdezhen form the vast majority. There are small quantities of crude Fujian greenware, Dehua whiteware and fine shufu ware. But the most impressive element of the ceramic cargo is an extensive repertoire of rare Yuan dynasty blue-and-white porcelain, far more than has ever been recovered from a documented wreck site anywhere else in the world.

Without dated coins or organic material suitable for radiocarbon analysis, dating can only be attempted through the stylistic analysis of the ceramics cargo.

Longquan celadon first appeared in the twelfth century. It was favoured throughout most of the thirteenth century by the Song imperial court for its sumptuous jade-like attributes. During the fourteenth century, the Longquan kilns expanded production to cater to an ever-increasing demand for a wide repertoire of large moulded shapes from domestic and foreign markets. The array of Longquan celadon recovered from the Temasek Wreck is typical of the fourteenth century, but being more specific can be contentious due to the longevity of various decorative techniques and patterns.

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 ”.

While excavating the fourteenth-century Temasek Wreck off Pedra Branca,1 tidal overfalls were frequently observed, waves broke on submerged rocks, and intense squalls struck out of nowhere. All this during neap tides in the calm season. The wrecking potential of the rock outcrop at the eastern entrance of the Singapore Strait was very apparent.

In 1596, the Dutch merchant Jan Huygen van Linschoten wrote:

Not just some. In Charles Buckley's 1902 work, An Anecdotal History of Singapore, he states:

Cursory examination of eighteenth-century records and nineteenthcentury newspapers revealed the names of several of the ships “lost on Pedra Branca”.

With a list of possible shipwrecks, and the potential discovery of more pre-European sites such as the Temasek Wreck, which were not recorded in state or company archives, the National Heritage Board (NHB) commissioned the Archaeology Unit (AU) of the ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute to carry out a search in the immediate vicinity of Pedra Branca. The rocky seabed precluded side-scan or multibeam sonar, so a magnetometer was deployed to detect cannons, anchors, iron cargoes or any other ferrous objects that could be associated with shipwrecks.

The search was conducted in mid-2019. After several fruitless dives on magnetometer hits, it was frustrating to discover that geomagnetic rock outcrops were causing the anomalies. But one anomaly was so big that it could only have been caused by a large quantity of iron. This turned out to be the twisted steel hull and cargo of the MV Yu Seung Ho, which had struck rocks and sank some three hundred metres east of Horsburgh Lighthouse in 1979.

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.

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.

This edited volume is the first of two forming an anthology that programmatically reconsiders the creative contribution of the littoral and insular regions of Maritime Asia—Southeast Asia in the first place—to shaping new paradigms in the Buddhist and Hindu art and architecture of the mediaeval Asian world. Far from being a mere southern conduit for the maritime circulation of Indic religions, in the period from ca. the 7th to the 14th century those regions transformed across mainland and island polities the rituals, icons, and architecture that embodied these religious insights with a dynamism that often eclipsed the established cultural centres in Northern India, Central Asia, and mainland China. This collective body of work brings together new research aiming to recalibrate the importance of these innovations in art and architecture, thereby highlighting the cultural creativity of the monsoon-influenced Southern rim of the Asian landmass. This approach aims at favouring the integration of these findings into the mainstream academic discourse pertaining to various disciplines, such as Art History, Archaeology, Religious Studies and Textual Studies, which too often have ignored the constitutive role played by the (supposedly ‘peripheral’) maritime regions in the genesis and development of cultural, religious, and artistic motifs across the mediaeval Indic world.

Current research increasingly shows that the Southeast Asian ‘peripheries’ were freer to innovate than the traditional ‘centres’, while the flourishing trade routes provided them with the necessary flow of human and material resources. As a result, the early kingdoms of Maritime Asia became wellsprings of cults, ritual technologies, sacred art/ architecture, and the new political models they underpinned. A transforming southern stream flowed from India and Sri Lanka, across the emerging island and littoral states, touching East Asia and eventually reaching Northeastern India, Nepal, and Tibet. For instance, images in the Chinese Mogao and Yulin caves, which have been hitherto ascribed to Tibetan influence, can now be seen to be influenced by the art of the Pallava dynasty of Southern India and related to teachings introduced to China by Vajrabuddhi/Vajrabodhi and popularized by his pupil Amoghavajra (Khokhlov, this volume). The early propagation of the new maṇḍala- and mantra-based soteriological and ritual systems beyond the subcontinent begins to be recorded in the late 7th century in the journeys of learned and enterprising monks over the so-called (land) ‘Silk Routes’.