The slab was blown up in 1843 during British colonial rule to clear and widen the passageway at the river mouth to make space for a fort and the quarters of its commander D.H. Stevenson.

(the first Master Attendant); the men on discovering the inscription were very much frightened, and could not be induced to go on with the clearing, which, if I recollect right, was completed by Chinese under the stimulus of high wages.

The stone, in shape, is a rude mass, and formed of the one-half of a great nodule broken into two nearly equal parts by artificial means; for the two portions now face each other, separated at the base by a distance of not more than two feet and a half, and reclining opposite to each other at an angle of about forty degrees.

The workmanship is far ruder than any thing of the kind that I have seen in Java or India; and the writing, perhaps from time, in some degree, but more from the natural decomposition of the rock, so much obliterated as to be quite illegible as a composition.

[14] About January 1843,[15] on the orders of the acting Settlement Engineer, Captain D.H. Stevenson, the slab was blown to pieces to clear and widen the passageway at the Singapore River mouth to make space for Fort Fullerton and the quarters of its commander.

[3][8] Some sources claim that the Superintendent of Public Works, George Drumgoole Coleman, was responsible for the Stone's destruction, but he was on leave and not in Singapore at the time of its blasting.

[3][18] According to Maxwell's papers,[6] when news of the destruction of the sandstone slab reached Bengal, James Prinsep asked the Governor of the Straits Settlements, Colonel William John Butterworth, to secure any legible fragments that might still exist and to send them to the Royal Asiatic Society's museum.

Butterworth replied: "The only remaining portion of the stone you mention, except what Colonel Low may have, I have found lying in the verandah of the Treasury at Singapore, where it was used as a seat by the Sepoys of the guard and persons in waiting to transact business.

Read, who arrived in Singapore in 1841: I remember a large block of the rock at the corner of Government House, where Fort Canning is now; but during the absence of the Governor at Penang on one occasion the convicts requiring stone to replace the road, chipped up the valuable relic of antiquity, and thus all trace of our past history was lost.

W. Montgomerie, recalling that the Bengal sailors who had discovered the slab while clearing the jungle could not be persuaded to continue the work, commented: "What a pity it is that those who authorized the destruction of the ancient relic were not prevented by some such wholesome superstition!

[27] In his 1834 work, The Malay Peninsula, Captain Peter James Begbie of the Madras Artillery, part of the Honourable East India Company, wrote: The principal curiosity of Singapore is a large stone at the point of the river, the one face of which has been sloped and smoothed, and upon which several lines of engraven characters are still visible.

Raffles apparently took the view that the writing had to be Hindu "because the Hindus were the oldest of all immigrant races in the East, reaching Java and Bali and Siam, the inhabitants of which are all descended from them".

"[13] Bland also discovered that when the Stone was viewed "when the sun was descending in the west, a palpable shadow was thrown into the letter, from which great assistance was derived.

He referred to the legend of the 14th-century strongman Badang in the Malay Annals (1821),[30] a posthumously-published English translation of the Sejarah Melayu (1612) by the British orientalist John Leyden (1775–1811).

The Rajah of that country sent a champion named Nadi Vijaya Vicrama to try his strength with him, staking seven ships filled with treasures on the issue of the contest.

After a few trials of their relative powers, Badang pointed to a huge stone lying before the Rajah's hall and asked his opponent to lift it, and to allow their claims to be decided by the greatest strength displayed in this feat.

It appears to be probable that the Kling Rajah, aware of this destitution of a written character, employed a sculptor of his own nation to cut the inscription on the rock, and that, from the epitaph being in an unknown language, the original story as therein related, being necessarily handed down by oral tradition, became corrupted in every thing but its leading features.

Laidlay examined fragments of the sandstone slab that had been donated to the Asiatic Society of Bengal by Colonel Butterworth and Lieutenant-Colonel James Low, strewing finely-powdered animal charcoal over the surface of the stones and sweeping it gently with a feather so as to fill up all the depressions; in this way "the very slightest of which was thus rendered remarkably distinct by the powerful contrast of colour.

Laidlay was unable to identify the characters with those of any published Sinhala inscriptions, but found it identical with Kawi, a literary language from the islands of Java, Bali and Lombok based on Old Javanese with many Sanskrit loanwords.

Comparing this to a corpus of ancient Sanskrit writings, he suggested that the fragment was part of the word "parakesarivarman" – a title used by several kings of the Tamil Chola dynasty in India.

[38] Another Dutch Indologist, N.J. Krom, judged from a rubbing of the Stone published in 1848 that the script resembled that of the Majapahit Empire but dated from a period somewhat earlier than 1360.

de Casparis, a scholar of ancient Indonesian writing, gave the preliminary judgment that the style of the script might date from an earlier period such as the 10th or 11th century.

[41] John Miksic has commented that while it is impossible to determine whether de Casparis's or Boechari's theory is more correct on the basis of epigraphy alone, it is easier to accept the conclusion that the person who commissioned the inscription was culturally Sumatran rather than Javanese, because by the 10th century the linguistic influence of Java had reached the Lampung region in the south of Sumatra, but no such influence has been discovered as far north as Singapore and there is no evidence of Javanese colonisation in Sumatra or the offshore islands at that time.

It was Mr. Raffles's opinion that the writing must be Hindu because the Hindus were the oldest of all immigrant races in the East, reaching Java and Bali and Siam, the inhabitants of which are all descended from them.

Perhaps he did not stop to consider that a man cleverer than he might extract its secrets from it, for I have heard it said that in England there are scholars with special knowledge who can easily understand such writing, whatever the language or race.

"At the end of the point there was another rock found among the brushwood; it was smooth, of square form, covered with a chiseled inscription which no one could read, as it had been worn away by water for how many thousands of years who can tell.

I thought from the appearance of the raised parts of the letters that it was Arabic, but I could not read it, as the stone had been subject to the rising and falling tides for such a long time.

"At the mouth of the river there is a large rock, which is concealed at high water, and on which a post was erected four or five years ago by, I believe, Captain Jackson of the Bengal Artillery, to warn boats of the danger; this is the rock fabled to have been hurled by Badang: He is said to have been buried at the point of the straits of Singhapura, the scene of this wonderful exploit; and there, the very spot where this record is to be still seen, the Rajah of Kling, who had been so serious a loser by it, ordered this monument to be erected.Fabulous and childish as the legend is, it brings us directly to the point.

History of the Indian Archipelago: Containing an Account of the Manners, Arts, Languages, Religions, Institutions, and Commerce of Its Inhabitants ; with Maps and Engravings in Three Volumes.

The Annals were written in the year of the Hegira 1021, or A.D. 1612, nearly four centuries afterwards, and the original circumstance thus became obscured by legendary traditions; but I think that we are fairly warranted in concluding that there was a remarkable wrestler of the name of Badang existing at that period, and that this inscription contained a recital of his feats, etc.