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Singapore Temasek and Singapura
Although legendary accounts shroud Singapore's earliest
history, chroniclers as far back as the second century
alluded to
towns or cities that may have been situated at that
favored
location. Some of the earliest records of this region are
the
reports of Chinese officials who served as envoys to the
seaports
and empires of the
Nanyang (southern ocean--see Glossary),
the
Chinese term for Southeast Asia. The earliest first-hand
account of
Singapore appears in a geographical handbook written by
the Chinese
traveler Wang Dayuan in 1349. Wang noted that Singapore
Island,
which he called Tan-ma-hsi (Danmaxi), was a haven for
several
hundred boatloads of pirates who preyed on passing ships.
He also
described a settlement of Malay and Chinese living on a
terraced
hill known in Malay legend as Bukit Larangan (Forbidden
Hill), the
reported burial place of ancient kings. The
fourteenth-century
Javanese chronicle, the Nagarakertagama, also noted
a
settlement on Singapore Island, calling it Temasek.
A Malay seventeenth-century chronicle, the Sejarah
Melayu (Malay Annals), recounts the founding of
a great
trading city on the island in 1299 by a ruler from
Palembang, Sri
Tri Buana, who named the city Singapura ("lion city")
after
sighting a strange beast that he took to be a lion. The
prosperous
Singapura, according to the Annals, in the
mid-fourteenth
century suffered raids by the expanding Javanese Majapahit
Empire
to the south and the emerging Thai kingdom of Ayutthaya to
the
north, both at various times claiming the island as a
vassal state.
The Annals, as well as contemporaneous
Portuguese
accounts, note the arrival around 1388 of King Paramesvara
from
Palembang, who was fleeing Majapahit control. Although
granted
asylum by the ruler of Singapura, the king murdered his
host and
seized power. Within a few years, however, Majapahit or
Thai forces
again drove out Paramesvara, who fled northward to found
eventually
the great seaport and kingdom of Malacca. In 1414
Paramesvara
converted to Islam and established the Malacca Sultanate,
which in
time controlled most of the Malay Peninsula, eastern
Sumatra, and
the islands between, including Singapura. Fighting ships
for the
sultanate were supplied by a senior Malaccan official
based at
Singapura. The city of Malacca served not only as the
major seaport
of the region in the fifteenth century, but also as the
focal point
for the dissemination of Islam throughout insular
Southeast Asia.
Data as of December 1989
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