Nusantara.com: Essays: Displacing Singapore, i

intro | i | ii | iii

I have neither desires nor fears’, the Khan declared, ‘and my dreams are composed either by my mind or by chance.

Cities also believe they are the work of the mind or of chance, but neither the one nor the other suffices to hold up their walls You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives a question of yours.

Or the question it asks you, forcing you to answer, like Thebes through the mouth of the Sphinx.

   Italo Calvino, Dialogue of Marco Polo & the Great Khan, Imaginary Cities


When this place meant something, many years ago, there was a boulder that stood on a sandy spit at the mouth of the Singapore River. Two meters tall, the boulder had been split in two, one face carved to receive an inscription. Of the inscription we know very little, for only fragments remain. It was an Indic script, marking the island’s relations with the powerful port kingdoms of the Malay World: Majapahit probably, the Empire of the Bael Tree, or perhaps the old Sumatran kingdom of Srivijaya.

Five hundred years ago, or a thousand, Singapore was one of the many ports that grew, flourished, and faded back into an ignominy of mud and mosquitoes, in time with the tidal ebb of trade, of power, of the varying charisma of princes and admirals. In the ninth century Singapore was Dragon’s Tooth Gate, a far port on the Chinese maps; in the 13th, she sent a tribute of elephants to the Great Khan.

In the 14th, judging from the old Annals, and from a few bits of celadon and a gold bracelet found on the Forbidden Hill that backs the river, Singapore was home to a prince, or princes. But we know little of these princes and their realm: was Singapore the temporary encampment for renegade prince on his way to found Malacca? Or was it a thriving city on its own, capital to three, or even five, generations of rulers, center of the Malay World, before Malacca? The Annals are ambiguous, yielding to many readings. Scholars are divided, or at least, resigned to uncertainty. Propagandists prefer not to dig too deeply. Archaeologists have nowhere left to dig: few patches of soil in Singapore remain undisturbed.

The Singapore Stone was the surviving witness to this history, to all the wealth and transience of old Temasek, of Sri Tri Buana, Parameswara and Iskandar Shah, the World Conqueror.

Munshi Abdullah, dedicated, compromised chronicler of early British Singapore, and the man who tutored Raffles in Malay, records how wise men from all of Singapore’s communities claimed the Stone for their own: "The Indians declared that the writing was Hindu but they were unable to read it. The Chinese claimed that it was in Chinese characters. I went with a party of people, and also Mr Raffles and Mr Thomsen, and we all looked at the rock. I noticed that in shape the lettering was rather like Arabic, but could not read it…"
Some applied colored powders or lampblack to the stone, some took rubbings, some made castings, in an effort to better discern the outline of the blurred and worn characters. We will never know which wise man was closest to the truth, because in 1843 the Singapore Stone was broken up to make way for the house of the Harbormaster.

The few surviving pieces of the Stone -- placed for safekeeping, or as a curiosity, on the veranda of the Governor’s Mansion -- were hacked up by laborers for gravel a few years later, to pave the driveway. Three fragments remain to this day: two in Singapore’s History Museum, one catalogued but impossible to find, somewhere in the storage of the Calcutta Museum.

Singapore is a land that has misplaced its most ancient monument.

Who is the wise man who will claim the emptiness that remains?

 
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