Must read and share to debunk the lies that Singapore was barren and a fishing village before the PAP. Oh what lies have they spun to suppress knowledge of our rich history back - we were a thriving and populous city even in the 14th century! All just to make LKY look like an iconic founder and PAP as Saviours. Oh what a bunch of shameless LIARS and con artists. Singapore and the The Silk Road of the Sea”...a splendid new book by John Miksic, an archaeologist at the National University of Singapore, reveals the glaring omission in this account. Singapore was also a thriving, populous city in the 14th century. Soon after the British arrived, according to a scholarly journal published in 1820, Lieutenant Ralfe, an engineer, digging round the remains of the old city wall, found a stash of coins. It was Chinese, from the reign of an emperor of the Sung dynasty, who died in 1125. Raffles would not have been taken aback. A big reason he chose Singapore as a base rather than other islands in the vicinity was that he was a scholar of the region’s history, and had read of Singapore in a book called the “Malay Annals”. His intention, writes Mr Miksic was “to revive an ancient seaport that already had a glorious history”. That Singapore had an earlier incarnation as an important port and entrepot is one of three surprises that Mr Miksic has for a reader unaware of its history. The second shock is how much is known about that period. It is now the “best-known 14th-century city in South-East Asia”—despite Singapore’s lack of any centralised body co-ordinating archaeology. Some of the knowledge dates from Raffles’s era. But much of it comes from 28 years of work led by Mr Miksic, his students and a small group of volunteers. And they have built up this knowledge under a government that has always placed a much greater emphasis on growing for the future than conserving the past. Yet Mr Miksic has amassed a collection of 500,000 artefacts from ancient Singapore—almost all discarded as rubbish. They now take up virtually the entire interior of the former house of a late British colonel, on the university campus. The third surprise is in the title of the book. Singapore was a link in a chain of seaports linking China to the East with India and beyond to the West—a trade that goes back 2,000 years. Though the caravanserais of the Silk Road have received more attention, Mr Miksic argues the southern, maritime route was much more important from both cultural and commercial points of view.....
Posted on: Sun, 01 Dec 2013 10:57:45 +0000
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