On 16 June 2021 the National Heritage Board announced the successful conclusion of the archaeological excavation of two shipwrecks at the eastern approach to Singapore. This maritime archaeology excavation, the largest in Singapore’s waters, was conducted by the Archaeology Unit of the ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute over a six-year period. This book documents these two shipwrecks, complemented by essays on Singapore’s maritime history, from Temasek in the fourteenth century through the emergence of country trade in the late eighteenth century. These two shipwrecks challenge us to rethink Singapore’s history as globally connected, determined by what was happening on the seas in and around the island.

The essays published here began as a series of lectures commemorating the bicentennial of Thomas Stamford Raffles’s establishment of a British Station in 1819. The essays draw on thirty-five years of archaeological investigations on and around Fort Canning, new readings of the Malay Annals, early Chinese records reporting Singapore, and the Portuguese and Dutch records to probe and challenge our understanding of Singapore’s history before Raffles. Altogether, these essays suggest that Singapore had a pre-1819 past that was deeply connected to the millennium-long maritime history of the Straits of Melaka and its links to the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean.

In 1998, the Belitung, a ninth-century western Indian Ocean–style vessel, was discovered in Indonesian waters. Onboard was a full cargo load, likely intended for the Middle Eastern market, of over 60,000 Chinese Tang-dynasty ceramics, gold, and other precious objects. It is one of the most significant shipwreck discoveries of recent times, revealing the global scale of ancient commercial endeavors and the centrality of the ocean within the Silk Road story. But this shipwreck also has a modern tale to tell, of how nation-states appropriate the remnants of the past for their own purposes, and of the international debates about who owns—and is responsible for—shared heritage. The commercial salvage of objects from the Belitung, and their subsequent sale to Singapore, contravened the principles of the 2001 UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage and prompted international condemnation. The resulting controversy continues to reverberate in academic and curatorial circles. Major museums refused to host international traveling exhibitions of the collection, and some archaeologists announced they would rather see the objects thrown back in the sea than ever go on display. Shipwrecks are anchored in the public imagination, their stories of treasure and tragedy told in museums, cinema, and song. At the same time, they are sites of scholarly inquiry, a means by which maritime archaeologists interrogate the past through its material remains. Every shipwreck is an accidental time capsule, replete with the sunken stories of those on board, of the personal and commercial objects that went down with the vessel, and of an unfinished journey. In this moving and thought-provoking reflection of underwater cultural heritage management, Natali Pearson reveals valuable new information about the Belitung salvage, obtained firsthand from the salvagers, and the intricacies in the many conflicts and relationships that developed. In tracing the Belitung’s lives and afterlives, this book shifts our thinking about shipwrecks beyond popular tropes of romance, pirates, and treasure, and toward an understanding of how the relationships between sites, objects, and people shape the stories we tell of the past in the present.

This book addresses the topic of humanities education fieldwork using the Singapore context as its primary focus. It explores how the thought processes behind and techniques of various humanities and social sciences subjects can be applied to fieldwork in a variety of school and training settings. In addition, it discusses how humanities students and educators could stand to benefit from utilizing fieldwork techniques and skills used in archaeology and anthropology, beyond undergraduates majoring in that discipline. Finally, the adoption of multidisciplinary approaches in fieldwork incorporating history, geography, literature and social studies demonstrate how these subjects can collaborate together in actual case studies to facilitate participants’ learning in the field.

This book presents the proceedings of the international academic workshop on “Early Navigation in the Asia-Pacific Region: A Maritime Archaeological Perspective” held from June 21-23, 2013 at Harvard University campus and organized by Harvard-Yenching Institute. It includes high-quality papers focusing on the historical shipwrecks investigated by underwater archaeologists from Eastern Asian, including southern China, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, and North America, including California, Oregon and Washington in the US, as well as Mexico. These investigations reveal the history of the early pan-Pacific navigation and maritime globalization from the 16th to the 18th century, covering the background and formation, concept and practice, as well as the results and influence of this early globalization and global economy, emphasizing the maritime archaeological evidence of Spanish exploration of transportation between East Asia and North America. The book provides an excellent opportunity for maritime archaeologists from both sides of the Pacific to share the latest findings and new developments in maritime archaeological exploration. It discusses 16-18th century nautical trade and maritime cultural history and provides a comprehensive overview of research work in the Asia-Pacific region.

The tragedy of the loss in 1941 of two Royal Navy capital ships, HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse, the core of Churchill's deterrent Force Z, stunned the world. Churchill had hoped that sending a small powerful squadron of ships to Singapore would deter a threatened Japanese invasion of Malaya and Thailand. He was to be proved tragically wrong. This book explores in detail the wrecks of these two vessels and narrates a summary of the Japanese threat.

This book initiatively and systematically presents the latest discoveries in the context of shipwreck archaeology in China, telling the exciting story of the wrecks’ distribution, connotation and the research advances and empirically reconstructing the development of overseas trade and maritime cultures along the Maritime Silk Road, which flourished for more than 2000 years. The book features numerous high-quality images and comprehensively describes and reviews the development of the methodologies and technologies used in China’s underwater archaeology and underwater cultural heritage administration in recent decades.

This book tells the story and presents the objects found on the Tang Shipwreck, discovered off Belitung Island in Indonesia in 1998, and now housed at the Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore. It is one of the most significant archaeological discoveries of recent times. Found at the site was a remarkable cargo of some 60,000 Chinese ceramics dating from the Tang dynasty (618-907), along with finely wrought gold and silver objects, bronze mirrors, and more ordinary objects belonging to the crew. Just as remarkable were the remnants of the ship itself, which consisted of wooden planks sewn together with rope. This construction technique clearly indicated that the vessel had been built in the Persian Gulf or western reaches of the Indian Ocean, and had sailed all the way from the Middle East to China, and was on its way home when it ran aground in the Java Sea. The Tang Shipwreck is a time capsule into ninth-century China, but also reflects many other cultures. The ceramics were made for consumers halfway around the world, which demonstrates the market demand and taste could play a role in mass production even in an age of agonizingly slow and perilous communication. The ten essays in this profusely illustrated volume discuss the ceramics and other commodities onboard, the ship's construction and possible origin, China's maritime trade in the Tang period, Chinese ceramic production, ports of call in Asia and Southeast Asia, and life on board the ship.

Illuminating one thousand years of history, The Pilgrim Art explores the remarkable cultural influence of Chinese porcelain around the globe. Cobalt ore was shipped from Persia to China in the fourteenth century, where it was used to decorate porcelain for Muslims in Southeast Asia, India, Persia, and Iraq. Spanish galleons delivered porcelain to Peru and Mexico while aristocrats in Europe ordered tableware from Canton. The book tells the fascinating story of how porcelain became a vehicle for the transmission and assimilation of artistic symbols, themes, and designs across vast distances—from Japan and Java to Egypt and England. It not only illustrates how porcelain influenced local artistic traditions but also shows how it became deeply intertwined with religion, economics, politics, and social identity. Bringing together many strands of history in an engaging narrative studded with fascinating vignettes, this is a history of cross-cultural exchange focused on an exceptional commodity that illuminates the emergence of what is arguably the first genuinely global culture.