Architecture in Singapore
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And to round off these glimpses of Singapore, Singapore, referred to in these 19th century texts as
in 'Dictionnaire géographique' by Ennery and Hirth, 1840 edition - Personal library SINGHAPOUR, an island situated at 1° 17' latitude North, near the southern tip of the Malacca peninsula, from which it is separated by the channel of the same name. It has a surface area of 12 square miles; its soil is undulating and more fertile than first thought; already a large part of the island is producing pepper, spices, rice, sugar and other Indian products. But what makes it so important is its excellent harbour and its position overlooking the Strait of Malacca. These advantages, combined with a very healthy climate, prompted the English to acquire part of it in 1818, and the rest two years later. Sir Thomas Raffles founded the town of Singhapour in 1819, and within five years, instead of a population of 150 miserable fishermen, there was a flourishing city of 15,000 inhabitants. Today, the island of Singhapour has more than 40,000 inhabitants, and the English have already founded a second town, New-Harbour, with 1,600 inhabitants, most of them Malays. SINGHAPOUR, a city in trans-Gangetic India, founded in 1819 on the islet of the same name, is one of the finest examples of the rapid prosperity that commerce can spread. What was a fishing village 20 years ago is now a thriving city. Singhapour is built at the bottom of a gulf and has an excellent port. It is divided into three districts, the European town, the Chinese town and the Black town, inhabited by the Malay and Bouggi peoples. Europe, China, Arabia, India, Armenia and almost all the nations of Europe have their representatives and trading houses here. The population, including the garrison and the sailors, is 30,000; the Malay college, established by Raffles, and the Chinese college, formerly in Malacca, are flourishing there; its port has been declared free and open to all. Trade with India, China and Malaya is enormous and tends to increase every day; as early as 1834, trade amounted to more than 110 million francs. If the present prosperity continues, Singhapur will in a few years be the great market for the products of the Orient.
in 'Le tour du Monde' - Edouard Charton - 1870 - Personal library Singapore. - Description of the city and island, which I visited several times between 1854 and 1862. Few places are more interesting for a traveller from Europe than the city and island of Singapore, where a great variety of oriental races, religions and customs can be observed. The government, the garrison and the leading merchants are English, but the bulk of the population, including some of the richest merchants, the farmers inland, the craftsmen and the workers, is Chinese. The indigenous Malays are mostly fishermen and boatmen, and make up the entire police force. The Portuguese of Malacca are represented by a sizeable number of clerks and small merchants. The Klings of western India, who form a large group of Mohammedans, as well as many Arabs, are engaged in small industries and run shops. All Bengalis are service people and water carriers. Klings is the generic name given in the archipelago to Hindus who pass through or settle there.
The Parsis, who were few in number, formed a highly respected merchant class. There are also many Javanese, most of them sailors or servants, and traffickers from Sulawesi, Bali and several other islands in the archipelago. The port is full of ships and trading vessels from various European nations, hundreds of Malaysian barques (proas) and Chinese junks, and vessels of all sizes, from those weighing several hundred tonnes to small fishing boats and omnibus sampans. Add to this the city's beautiful public monuments, churches, mosques, Hindu temples, Chinese joss-houses (probably gambling houses), comfortable European houses, massive shops, original old kling and Chinese bazaars, and long suburbs of Chinese and Malay cottages. In short, of all these different elements of the population, it is the Chinese who dominate and attract the most attention from the foreigner: their numbers and activity give Singapore much of the appearance of a Chinese city. The Chinese merchant is generally a large, round-faced man with an important air, preoccupied with his business. His clothes (broad white shirt, blue or black trousers) are similar to those of the poorest coolies, but of finer fabric, and always clean and neat. His long tail, wrapped in red silk, hangs down to his heels. In town he has a fine shop or boutique, and in the country a good house. He also has a horse and a cabriolet, and every morning you can see him out walking to enjoy the fresh air. He is rich: he owns retail warehouses and merchant ships; he lends at high interest and on good security; in a word, he does big business, and gets fatter and richer every year. In the Chinese bazaar, there are hundreds of small shops selling all sorts of hardware and other useful goods, most of which are wonderfully cheap. You can buy gimlets for two pennies, four balls of white cotton thread for a penny, penknives, corkscrews, gunpowder, stationery and many other items for as little or even less than in England. The shopkeeper is very good-natured; he shows you everything he has in his shop, and shows no displeasure if you don't buy anything from him. He overcharges a little, but not as much as the Klings, who always ask twice the price they want. If you buy something from him, he will then talk to you every time you pass his shop, asking you to come in, sit down and have a cup of tea; and you wonder how he can make a living, with so many others selling all the same items of so little value. Tailors sit at a table, not on one, and, like shoemakers, they work well and cheaply. Barbers have a lot to do; they shave heads and clean ears; for this last operation, they have a whole set of small tweezers, ear picks and brushes. The suburbs are full of carpenters and blacksmiths. The former seem to be mainly occupied with making coffins and clothing chests, decorated and painted to effect. The blacksmiths are mostly gunsmiths, making rifles by hand from bars of solid iron. You can see them hard at work every day; they see it through to the end and the weapons, for which they also make the locks, look very good. Everywhere in the streets you come across vendors selling water, vegetables, fruit, soup and agar-agar (jelly from sea plants): these people shout as unintelligibly as the merchants in London; others carry a device for cooking at the end of a pole with a table at the other end which forms a counterweight; they serve a meal of shellfish, rice and vegetables for two or three pennies. On all sides, coolies and boatmen wait to be employed. In the interior of the island, the Chinese cut down trees in the jungle and saw them into planks. They grow vegetables, which they take to market, as well as pepper and gambir, important trade items. .../...
Text and engravings from Voyage pittoresque autour du Monde - Dumont d'Urville - 1839 Sincapour has two roadsteads, the old and the new, one quite good, though open, the other wonderfully safe; we chose the latter, situated to the west of the town. > Sincapore was for me a favourite place, a kind of model country, where in ten years of existence the marvels predicted by Adam Smith and his followers had been realised. I wanted to see this favoured country and to see it well. My first visit was to the European city where I found lodgings: it is situated on the left bank of the river. I saw the resident's hotel, built of whitewashed bricks, a large dwelling but not very elegant, despite its beautiful colonnaded gallery. Not far from there, I passed in turn the courthouse, the prisons, the customs house, the botanical gardens, the hospice and a host of vast warehouses. Each district attracted my attention in turn: to the east of the river, the Boughi camp, and the Arab camp with its mosques; to the west, the Chinese camp with its streets known as Macao and Canton, with its temples and its curious cemetery; the Choulia camp populated by Hindus; finally the Malay camp thrown further away from the commercial centre and grouped with its more modest houses on the banks of a small navigable river. Like the inhabitants of Sumatra, they wear jackets with sleeves and loincloths around their bodies. They also wear kriss on their belts and a handkerchief rolled around their heads. As for the women, their usual costume is still the checked skirt, the cap and the loincloth in saltire. Their footwear consists of a wooden sole held high above the ground by two supports; the sole is attached to the foot by a simple ball peg that fits between the toe and the second finger. Constant use of such sandals is all that prevents them from being left on the path.
The area around Sincapour offers some delightful sites: around the town there are alleys and promenades where every evening, at sunset, the Creoles come to meet in their pretty crews pulled by small Javanese horses, with their graceful forms and dashing gaits. Further on, and above the flooded land covered by the Malay huts, a hill begins, with a gentle, shady slope. On its summit are the prettiest dwellings you can see, charming villas where European traders go to distract themselves from the hardships of trade and breathe fresher, healthier air than that of the coast. The view from the top of these mounds is admirable. Through massifs of greenery, Sincapour whitens at their feet with its line of symmetrical streets and its river bustling with boats and ships; further on you can see the entrance to the port with a few cannons in action; further still, the harbour with its hemicycle of masts; finally, in the background, a few small, scattered Malay islands, which merge into the great, high reliefs of Sumatra. The pleasure houses that line these peaks are almost all single-storey, raised on piles and protected from the reptiles and insects so common in these hot, rainy climates. Their interior furnishings are comfortable, rich and elegant. Gardens and clumps of trees surround the main building; young plants of cinnamon and clove trees cover the inner slopes of the hills. If you look at the land where these new crops are growing, it's easy to see that man's handiwork has recently conquered it. Charred tree skeletons and enormous roots denting the soil attest to the fact that axe and fire have cleared away the primitive vegetation. Just a few metres from the cleared enclosure, this vegetation reappears, with its majestic trunks and slender, hairy treetops. In these virgin forests, the hand of man is nowhere to be seen; there is silence and shade everywhere; and as the ferocious beasts, which always flee the vicinity of dwellings, have gradually retreated to the central gorges of the island, it is scarcely that a few wildcats, a few unces and other carnivorous animals come from time to time to disturb the calm and security of this area. Founded only yesterday, Sincapour does not yet have territorial resources commensurate with its industrial development. Its settlers, absorbed in their role as speculators and warehousemen, have not yet had the time or the desire to take advantage of the rich, watered soil and mild, healthy climate. As a result, supplies are scarce, always expensive and often of inferior quality. Only the Chinese are involved in gardening; they cultivate with the greatest profit a few pieces of land located in the vicinity of the town. In a few years' time, no doubt, these initial trials will have given way to work carried out on a larger scale: Sincapour will no longer need to ask neighbouring islands and continents for the food it needs to supply its ships; its own land will suffice. The mixed population that flocks there will have grown to such an extent that it will be possible to allocate part of it to agricultural progress; exaggerated profits will attract arms to this exploitation, and soon competition will take charge of improving the products and bringing prices within reasonable terms.
The founding of Sincapour is a contemporary event that can be recounted in a few sentences. After the treaty which gave Holland back almost all its possessions in the Malay Archipelago, the last English governor of Batavia, Sir Stamford Raffles, found it useful and politic to secure for Great Britain an outpost in the China Seas. He therefore visited the most favourable points in turn, considered Riou, the Carimon Islands and the Johor peninsula, and finally settled on Sincapour. Authorised by the Governor-General of Bengal, the Marquis of Hastings, he took possession of the island with Colonel Farquhar on 6 February 1819. By a strange coincidence, Sincapur had also been ceded a century earlier by the King of Johor to the English Captain Hamilton, whose account had wildly exaggerated the island's fertility. However, the modern colonisers were unaware of this pre-existing right when they were granted the portion of the coastline where they founded their factories by the indigenous owners. No attempt was made at the time to draw up formal and definitive stipulations: it was only as the settlement progressed, and around 1824, that an agreement was signed between the dispossessed sons of Sultan Mahomet, who died King of Johor in 1810, and the English resident of Sincapour. Ownership and sovereignty of the island were ceded to the British government, in return for the sum of 60,000 piasters and an annual payment of 24,000 piasters to each of them. The island of Sincapour, which this treaty placed under British patronage, is elliptical in shape, 37 miles long and 15 miles wide. It is separated from the Malacca peninsula only by a narrow channel; its southern front faces a chain of islands, most of which are deserted or inhabited by savage races. The general appearance of Sincapour is uneven and undulating; the land around the trading post is sandy but fertile. Its forests are abundant in timber and contain almost all the quadrupeds that inhabit the peninsula: monkeys of several species, the wild cat, the otter, the squirrel, the porcupine, the bradype, the fallow deer and the moschus pygmeus, a species of hare without ears, common in tropical regions. Ferocious beasts such as tigers, leopards, etc. appear to be unknown in Sincapour. As for birds, they are numerous and varied; the most common are climbers and palmipeds. Reptiles infest the island; during his stay, Mr Crawfurd recognised more than forty species of snake, only two of which were venomous.
Thanks to its even temperature, which barely varies between 20° and 27° centigrade, Sincapour shares with Poulo-Penang the reputation of being a salubrious site that is favourable to the sick. Englishmen driven from Bengal or the Coromandel coast by fevers and dysentery come to Sir Stamford's island in search of healing and health. The products of the soil help as much as the climate to provide unexpected cures. Oranges, mangoes and the fruit of the mangosteen tree are exquisitely tasty and fragrant. All the vegetables and floury roots of the equatorial zones have succeeded here, but our European varieties, the artichoke, cauliflower and potato, have so far failed every test. It is easy to see why Sincapour, which has only just come into being, cannot yet have any manufacturing industry, which is always the result of a slow and laborious civilisation. A few building sites and pearl sago factories were all that remained of the industrial establishments in 1830. But its trade and warehousing transactions had already exceeded all preconceived expectations. Thanks to broad franchises, obtained this time from the Compagnie privilégiée des Indes, European ships, Malay pros, barques from Siam, junks from China, Cochinchina and Japan, boats from the Boughis and the Philippine archipelago, now seem to meet in the roadstead of Sincapour, a kind of neutral ground for all trading nations and all trades. Every year, there are one hundred direct shipments from English ports; vessels from the United States, France, Sweden, Holland, the Ansean cities, Genoa, Trieste and Danzig, ships of various flags and tonnages, all heading for the new colony beyond the Cape of Good Hope. In the Indian Ocean, the list is growing; the Isle of France, Ceylon, Madras, Calcutta, Bombay, Batavia, Padang, Poulo-Penang, all European posts, pour in and demand products of a thousand kinds. Canton in China, Qui-Nhon, Faifo and Hué in Cochinchina; Saigon, Kang Kao in Cambodia; Bangkok, in the Gulf of Siam; Manila, the Celebes, Borneo, Java, have also organised their trade and gradually developed their relations. Not very productive on its own, Sincapour draws products from all over the world to its warehouses: Europe and Bengal accept Nanking, silk, lacquer, Chinese paper, mother-of-pearl, camphor, cassia, dragon's blood and pepper from the Malay Archipelago in return for their irons, zinc, cotton and woollen fabrics, sugar from Siam, copper from Japan, coffee, elephant teeth, rhubarb, cloves, nutmegs, tortoise shells, musk and orpiment from various Asian, Oceanic and American regions. This commercial movement, imperceptible at first, has grown so marvellously and so rapidly that it is now estimated to be worth more than 150 million francs a year. In 1819, 150 Malays, half fishermen, half pirates, occupied the small cove of Sincapour, and five years later, in January 1824, a census conducted by Mr Crawfurd showed the population to be 10,683; in 1825, 11,851; in 1826, 12,905; in 1827, 13,732. There were 16,850 people in 1830, and 19,200 in 1832, made up of Chinese, Malays, Boughis, Hindus, Europeans, Javanese and Siamese.
Among these peoples of different origins, there are two who dominate Sincapour in terms of numbers: the Chinese and the Malays, who together make up five-sixths of the total population. The Chinese of Sincapour are subdivided into five classes, all of them merchants, but distinct in their customs, habits and language. The most esteemed of all are the natives of Fo-Kien; next come the natives of Canton, then those of Macao and the adjacent islands; after them, the fishermen of the coastal province of Aya; finally the Creoles, Chinese or of mixed race. All these emigrants are active, patient, hard-working, intelligent and shrewd in business. They are not averse to any trade, as long as it is profitable for them; they are wholesalers, dealers, second-hand dealers, shopkeepers, stockbrokers, commission agents, farmers, sailors, and so on. Religious observers of their native customs, the Chinese are always careful to arrange their life abroad in such a way as to remind them of their homeland. In Sincapur, they have cemeteries as green and as full of flowers as those in Canton: in each of their homes, decorated on the outside with symmetrical paintings, there is an altar before which perfumes and golden papers are constantly burnt. Confucius is depicted with the familiar genie talking in his ear. This love of country is so strong, so tenacious among the Chinese, that none of them gives up on seeing it again. When they have amassed some savings, they leave the foreign colony and sneak back to their native province. There, if the law were executed to the letter, the most severe penalties would await them; but the price of immunity is known and stipulated in advance. In return for surrendering half the fortune acquired to the mandarin, the emigrant can enjoy the other half in peace; he is absolved of the contravention by the silence of the magistrate. The Malays of Sincapour are second only to the Chinese in activity and intelligence. They are divided into two classes: the land Malays or Orang-Darat, and the sea Malays or Orang-Laut. The first are lumberjacks, ploughmen and retailers; the others are boatmen, bargemen or fishermen. The Malays who work the small strait of Sincapour are also called Orang-Sallat: almost all of them come from the province of Johore. These three types of native differ little in their general characteristics from the Malay races already described. Above them must be placed the Boughis or Oriental Malays, natives of Celebes, an industrious people and good navigators.
Although there were barely fifteen European houses in Sincapour, they were the lifeblood of the fledgling colony. Without these houses, there would be no capital, no order, no confidence and no business. The presence of the resident of the strongest nation in India makes these measures of commercial openness, the source of all prosperity, all the more effective. In this small part of the world, where English sagacity obviously wanted to carry out an experiment, it was necessary to ensure that interests would have no fears and would not be hindered. In addition to a free port, free warehousing and tonnage duties that were equal for all and insignificant, strict justice and police measures were instituted, which alone could ensure the reign of relative fairness and law. During the first years, the resident acted alone as judge, and his decrees were nevertheless executed with respect. Since then, Sincapour having been annexed to the residences of Malacca and Poulo-Penang, courts of justice have been set up there, following the example of those governing Anglo-Indian possessions. The only characteristic remark to which this innovation gave rise was that trials were more numerous among the colonists whose civilisation was more advanced: it was noted, for example, that the proportion of cases between Chinese or Europeans was ten times higher than between the Malays and the Boughis. The town of Sincapour is naturally divided into three parts: the Chinese quarter, the European quarter and the Malay quarter. The last two are on the plain facing the harbour; the third is a little above, to the right of the river. The commercial part of the city forms a small peninsula that ends in a tongue in the gulf. Concentrated on this point, the markets, warehouses and shops give it the air of a perpetual fair. The rest of the city is made up of streets drawn at right angles and lined with pretty houses. Although the English power is respected in Sincapour as much as in the best-guarded places in India, the armed force under the orders of the resident barely amounts to one hundred and fifty Cipayes, whose upkeep costs a few thousand piastres a year. To cover administrative expenses, the colony had to draw up a budget, the revenue from which, according to Mr Crawfurd, amounted to 80,000 piasters in 1826. A few retail duties on the sale of opium, a tax on the home manufacture of fermented liquors, another tax on gambling, and finally a few licence fees, annuity transfers and postage fees, all light and almost unnoticed charges, were enough to cover colonial expenses. With the help of such means, Sincapour, in the two years of its existence, renewed, in our commercial world, those miracles of rising prosperity that history attributes to Tyre, the most opulent warehouse of antiquity. The creators of the modern factories had the will and the power to govern them according to science, not politics. At the same time as they were content with a simple administrative system and an easy and gentle tax base, they avoided all the errors of previous systems, the egoism of the flag, the mania for protectorate that always results in privileges for some and exclusions for others, the fiscal tendencies that proceed by restrictions or prohibitions; They created the cosmopolitanism of trade and navigation, appealing to all the peoples of the globe through the equality of rights and responsibilities, and complementing the principles of religious tolerance practised for a century through the implementation of a uniform and tempered tariff. Seen from this angle, Sincapour would be a bitter criticism of our European system. It is even to be feared that the government of Great Britain and the Company's monopolists will sooner or later change their minds and counteract results hostile to their administrative tendencies. A priori, the axioms of economic science could be dismissed as dreams and utopias; but how can we respond to an experiment? how can we oppose figures? an obvious progression like the flow of the sea? How can you fight a statistical argument that is growing stronger by the day, that proves ten times as much today as it did in 1827, and that in 1840 will prove a hundred times as much again? You have to resign yourself or play a cunning game. Undoubtedly the monopolists will not perish without trying to defend themselves; they will find some snare, some ambush against the Chinese-Malay colony; but in any case, and even if its prosperity were to weaken under their hands, the precedent remains with us forever; the practice of commercial freedom has justified the theory.
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