Singapore’s early history captured in Chinese merchant’s ‘A Brief Account of the Barbarians of the Islands’ is closest we have to a reliable historical record
- Fourteenth-century traveller Wang Dayuan wrote of pirates and people wearing headdresses and red cloths in his account of Singapore, part of a wider work
- Singapore has had several Chinese names in the past, including Shi Le, Xi La and Xi Li
The first giant panda cub that was born in Singapore was finally named at the end of 2021, on December 29. The name Le Le, which garnered the most votes in an online poll and is “one that is proudly indicative of his birth city”, is derived from Shi Le Po, an old Chinese name for Singapore. Shi le is the Chinese phonetic approximation of selat, the Malay word for “strait”, while po can refer to a large, low-lying field or, by inference, a “settlement”.
The main island of Singapore lies at the southern entrance of the Strait of Malacca, still one of the most important shipping lanes in the world. The busy Singapore Strait to its south is traversed by 2,000 merchant ships a day, and the narrow Johor Strait north of the island is a maritime border separating the modern nation states of Singapore and Malaysia.
Documents from China’s Qing dynasty (1644-1912), which maintained a consulate in colonial-era Singapore, also refer to the major port city as Xi La or Xi Li. Shi le, xi la and xi li are all modern Mandarin pronunciations. The pronunciations of the same words in the various southern Chinese dialects, the speakers of whom formed most of the people of Chinese descent in Singapore, would be much closer to how the Malay word selat is read.
Shi Le Po was not the first Chinese name for the diamond-shaped island at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula.
Wang Dayuan (1311-1350), an intrepid Chinese merchant and traveller, made two long voyages, in 1330 and 1337, which took him to the coastal states, settlements and islands in Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean, all the way to Egypt and maybe even Morocco. Wang’s private travels predated the more famous state-sanctioned voyages of the eunuch admiral Zheng He by over seven decades.
After his return to China, Wang wrote A Brief Account of the Barbarians of the Islands, with brief descriptions of the geography, customs and produce of over 200 places in Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean that he had visited. One of these places was Dan Ma Xi, or Temasek.
Temasek is an archaic Javanese name for the island of Singapore that means “land surrounded by water”. Wang’s brief description of Dan Ma Xi is one of the very few reliable records of Singapore’s pre-British past.
Residents in the main settlement wore a headdress over their short hair and tied a red cloth around their body. Singapore in the 14th century produced hornbill casques and laka wood, which the Chinese use for incense, and traded in items such as fabrics, metals and metal products, and ceramics.
Wang called another part of the island Long Ya Men (“Dragon’s Teeth Gate”), referring to a craggy granite outcrop that was eventually blown up by the British five centuries later in 1848 to widen the entrance to the harbour. The residents of that settlement were prone to piracy, raiding the cargoes of passing ships and killing their passengers.
Intriguingly, Wang wrote that there were Chinese who lived among them. He did not elaborate if these Chinese were pirates, ordinary residents or captives.
Wang’s travelogue may not provide a totally accurate description of the peoples and the places that he had visited, but it is the closest we have to a reliable, albeit brief, historical record of not just Singapore, but many other places in Southeast Asia and further west.
