Hikayat Abdullah

[3] The work has been described as Abdullah's autobiography, and contains his personal but perceptive view of Singapore and Malaccan society at the beginning of the 19th century.

The work also contains his personal observations of the personalities of his time, the officials of the British East India Company, like Sir Stamford Raffles, Colonel Farquhar and John Crawfurd, Sultan Hussein Shah of Johor Sultanate, European and American missionaries and traders, and the Chinese merchants of the early Singapore.

[6] A more authoritative English edition was translated by A.H. Hill and published in the Journal of the Malayan Branch Royal Asiatic Society (Volume XXVIII Part 3, June 1955).

Indeed, in chapter 35, the character Kenneth Toomey decides to write a novel based on Hikayat Abdullah: That afternoon I read the brief autobiography, lying on the bed under the gentle fan.

A novel about Raffles, an East India Company clerk who got Java out of the hands of the French during the Napoleonic wars, ruled it like an angel, then grabbed Sumatra, then negotiated the purchase of a lump of swampy land called Singapore.

Odd trips to museums somewhere, Penang, Malacca, but the writing done here, in this bare room, tuan mahu minum, a queer case of propro this morning at the rumah sakit, home.

I am remembering my old master, an orang puteh or white man from a far cold island, one who was father and mother to me but has abandoned me to a loneliness which only memory can sweeten.’ By God, I would do it.

I saw the jacket illustration: a handsome weary man in Regency costume brooding over a plan with a Chinese overseer, a background of coolies hacking at the mangroves.

A page of the Hikayat Abdullah written in Malay in the Jawi script , from the collection of the National Library of Singapore . A rare first edition, it was written between 1840 and 1843, printed by lithography , and published in 1849.