The Temasek Timeline - Singapore's Story Before Singapore

history, society, culture · EN

Every city has a founding story. Singapore's is told so well that most people stop listening at 1819. But the island was here long before that date. Sailors were plying these waters more than a thousand years before Raffles arrived. A city rose on a hill, grew rich, and was gone before Europe had even found the sea route east. Kings claimed it, rivals razed it, sea peoples held it, and chroniclers writing in ancient languages recorded it. Sometimes they told the truth, and sometimes they had reasons not to. The Temasek Timeline is that story, told from the very beginning. A story of princes and pretenders, of traders who crossed oceans on the wind, and of a strait so narrow and valuable that whoever held it held the fortunes of half the known world. It is also a story about what survives. A few lines in a court chronicle. A traveller's notes from an earlier century. Gold buried in the soil of a hill. A broken inscription that no one has ever been able to read. Chro