Today, the nation of Singapore is known for many things: as a global financial hub, for its bustling airport, and as the setting of the 2018 film adaptation of Kevin Kwan’s novel, Crazy Rich Asians. Due to its relatively small size (roughly 734.3km²), this island is often referred to colloquially as the ‘little red dot’. The modern history of this ‘little red dot’ is often taken to ‘begin’ in 1819, the year Sir Stamford Raffles established a British colonial presence on the island on behalf of the British East India Company.

However, Singapore’s history as a port-city began centuries before Raffles arrived. In recent years, there has been a growing amount of historical research on Singapore’s (or Temasek’s) premodern past. This includes exploring Singapore’s role as a port-city along what the archaeologist John N. Miksic refers to as the ‘Silk Road of the Sea’, a maritime trading network connecting East, Southeast and South Asia. For over 2,000 years, these routes facilitated the flow of vast quantities of goods, numerous people and influential ideas and faiths – including Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam and Christianity – across the region.[1] 

Following its founding over 700 years ago, Singapore, too, became part of this network.[2] The island’s role has varied over the years, but within the seventeenth century at least, the volume of trade passing through this port-city was significant enough for there to have been a harbour master’s compound on the island (known as a shabandaria or ‘Xabandaria’), as reflected on contemporary maps, including this 1604 one.

Early modern Singapore was likewise vibrant enough to earn a place in both Asian and European literature. Within Asian writing, the island features within the Sulalat al-Salatin (The Genealogy of Kings; also known as the Sejarah Melayu or Malay Annals), a work of Malay historical literature. Revised in the seventeenth century, this text recounts the establishment of ‘Singa Pura’ and narrates how ‘[i]n time, Singa Pura developed into an extensive state’, a place where ‘[a]l the merchants would gather … in great numbers’, as this island ‘became famous throughout the world’.[3]

Singapore is also present within early modern European literature, earning a mention within Luís Vaz de Camões’s Os Lusíadas (1572), an epic that has been regarded as the national poem of Portugal, and that was first translated into English by Sir Richard Fanshawe in 1655.

Os Lusíadas traces Vasco da Gama’s voyage from Lisbon to India in 1497-99, a voyage credited with opening the maritime trading route between Europe and Asia. Where the bulk of the epic focuses on da Gama’s encounters with South Asia, the final book (Book 10) broadens its geographic vision. There, the sea-goddess Thetis shows the Portuguese explorer a globe and reveals the parts of the world that his nation would encounter as they developed their sprawling commercial empire.

After describing South Asia and Indochina, Thetis points out the flourishing port-city of Malacca (Melaka). Shortly afterwards, she turns to the tip of the Malay peninsula, declaring that ‘at that Point doth CINGAPUX appeare: / Where the pincht Streight leaves Ships no room to play’, to quote from Fanshawe’s translation.[4]

By ‘CINGAPUX’, Thetis means Singapore (the original Portuguese verse refers to the island as ‘Cingapura’). In having Thetis highlight the slender girth of the maritime channels near this island, Camões demonstrates both how well-known these narrow waterways had become by the early modern period, as well as just how challenging it was for European sailors to navigate the trading world of archipelagic Southeast Asia.

While ‘Singa Pura’ or ‘Cingapux’ may not dominate either Malay or European writing, the references to this port-city in Eastern and Western literature alike intimate how far knowledge of this island had travelled within the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The ‘little red dot’, it seems, had already made its presence felt within global literary culture, long before Raffles arrived.

A preserved archeological site at Singapore’s Fort Canning Park, where artefacts from the 14^th century have been unearthed, testifying to this island’s long history. [Image: author’s own]

[1] See further, John N. Miksic, Singapore and the Silk Road of the Sea, 1300-1800 (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2013).

[2] On the year of Singapore’s founding, see Ibid, 2.

[3] Tun Seri Lanang, The Genealogy of Kings (Sulalat al-Salatin), trans. Muhammad Haji Salleh (Singapore: Penguin Books, 2020), 30.

[4] Luís Vaz de Camões, The Lusiad, trans. Richard Fanshawe (London, 1655), sig. Ff1v. The italicization is Fanshawe’s.

Title Image: Part of Singapore Island [detail]. Accessed here