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.

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.

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 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.

Beneath the modern skyscrapers of Singapore lie the remains of a much older trading port, prosperous and cosmopolitan and a key node in the maritime Silk Road. This book synthesizes 25 years of archaeological research to reconstruct the 14th-century port of Singapore in greater detail than is possible for any other early Southeast Asian city. The picture that emerges is of a port where people processed raw materials, used money, and had specialized occupations. Within its defensive wall, the city was well organized and prosperous, with a cosmopolitan population that included residents from China, other parts of Southeast Asia, and the Indian Ocean. Fully illustrated, with more than 300 maps and colour photos, Singapore and the Silk Road of the Sea presents Singapore's history in the context of Asia's long-distance maritime trade in the years between 1300 and 1800: it amounts to a dramatic new understanding of Singapore's pre-colonial past.

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.

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.