Early history of Singapore
An early reference may be in the 2nd century work by Ptolemy which identified a coastal port at the southernmost tip of the Malay Peninsula, called Sabana.
A place called Sabana or Sabara was marked on the 11th Map of Asia at the southern tip of the Golden Khersonese (meaning the Malay Peninsula) where Singapore may lie.
[13] It is also recorded by the Chinese traveller Wang Dayuan who visited the island around 1330 and described a place called Dan Ma Xi (單馬錫, a transcription of the Malay Temasek).
In his work Daoyi Zhilüe, Wang Dayuan described Long Ya Men as the two hills of Temasek that looked like "Dragon's teeth" between which a strait runs, and wrote about the place: The fields are barren and there is little padi ...
The beginning of the year is calculated from the [first] rising of the moon, when the chief put on this head-gear and wore his [ceremonial] dress to receive the congratulations [of the people].
[17] Wang described another settlement on a hill behind Long Ya Men called Ban Zu (班卒, a transcription of the Malay name pancur meaning a "spring").
[18] In contrast to those of Long Ya Men who were prone to piracy, the inhabitants of Ban Zu were described as honest, and they wore "their hair short, with turban of gold-brocaded satin," and were dressed in red cloth.
[21] Recent excavations in Fort Canning provide evidence that Singapore was a port of some importance in the 14th century[22] and used for transactions between Malays and Chinese.
The Sejarah Melayu (Malay Annals) contains a tale of a prince of Palembang, Sri Tri Buana (also known as Sang Nila Utama), who landed on Temasek after surviving a storm in the 13th century.
The Javanese source cited by Pires instead suggests that Temasek was a Siamese vassal whose ruler, titled Sang Aji, was killed by Parameswara from Palembang in the late 14th century.
[28] Parameswara held the island of Singapore for a number of years, until further attacks from either the Majapahit or the Ayutthaya kingdom in Siam forced him to move on to Melaka where he founded the Sultanate of Malacca.
In 1603, the Johor Malays formed an alliance with the Dutch and captured a Portuguese ship, the Santa Catarina off the east coast of Singapore; the looted porcelain came to be known as Kraak ware, and the arbitration over the legality of the Dutch attack included Hugo Grotius' treatise, the Mare Liberum, widely considered to be the progentior of modern maritime law.
This was spurred by the perceived need to establish a competitive port following the retrocession of the Dutch colonial empire in the East Indies to the Kingdom of Holland after the Napoleonic Wars had ended, which would have left the British with their unprofitable settlements of Penang and Bencoolen.
In his time as Governor of the Dutch East Indies, Raffles had compiled The History of Java and had John Leyden translate the Sejarah Melayu, which he cites as an inspiration to claim Singapore in its introduction.
