
SINGAPORE 1819 – A LIVING LEGACY, by Kennie Ting. Published by TALISMAN Singapore. In bookstores 18 October 2018.
On October 18th, my new book, SINGAPORE 1819 – A LIVING LEGACY launches. This is my third book, and it comes some three years after the first two.
I’m immensely pleased that it’s finally done, given that it is pretty much a year late, and the last few months, when I was busy coping with my job as well as finishing up the book, had been particularly challenging.
The book is what I would describe as a “big-picture take” on Singapore history and heritage. One that acknowledges and has as its starting point, the fact that Singapore history and heritage have always been global; that this phenomenon of Singapore has never existed in isolation from global geopolitics and the global economy of the day.

The Asian Civilisations Museum today sits at a historic location at the mouth of the Singapore River. [Photograph by the author.]

It is the second oldest-still standing building Singapore, having been built in 1867 to house Colonial Government Offices. Early 1900s. [Author’s Collection.]
From that vantage point, a global perspective on history and heritage is easy. I take on some 56 different aspects/chapters of our heritage, from People & Places, to Monuments & Architecture, Cultures & Communities, Arts & Leisure, and finally, Flora & Fauna.
For each of these aspects/chapters, my approach is the same – to uncover something new or forgotten about this particular “piece” of heritage, using a lens that is inevitably ACM-ish, which is to say it is a global, cross-cultural and art-historical lens. I believe that in so doing – because no one has really applied such an eccentric lens to Singapore heritage – the resulting book will prove to be a serendipitous read and a rather more contemporary take on very familiar issues.

Sir Thomas Stamford Bingley Raffles, by George Francis Joseph. Oil on Canvas. 1817. [Collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London.]
The portrait is painted in the Regency style – referring to the period when the future King George IV reigned as Regent in the stead of his father, the mad King George III. Raffles is portrayed as a man of letters – an allusion to his being the author of the seminal History of Java. Raffles has, for a backdrop, with a utopian landscape of Java. Beside him, sit two Hindu-Buddhist sculptures, alluding to his achievements in relation to “re-discovering” Borobudur and Prambanan – Java’s two most important Hindu-Buddhist monuments
While he was sitting for this portrait, he wouldn’t yet have known, that his greatest achievement – the founding of modern Singapore – had yet to come.

The Jackson Plan (1828), Singapore’s earliest town plan, was modeled after similar plans in the cities of British India, in particular, Calcutta. [Collection of the National Museum of Singapore.]
So we have everything from portraits of important personages, to a discussion on architectural styles, to forms of traditional arts and sports, and I even throw in the city-state’s increasingly ubiquitous Asiatic smooth-coated otters as a tongue-in-cheek way of closing the whole narrative.
The book isn’t by any means comprehensive – in the process of curating what goes into the book, I either dropped or “merged” many aspects of heritage, opting for a sort of harmonious and elegant composition of 5 main chapters containing within them, either 10 or 12 “nuggets” of heritage.
The resulting product is just about right in length and depth – enough to provoke new ways of thinking about age-old things, but never once overstaying its welcome.
That it is beautifully designed – I am also MOST PLEASED with the design, and so a BIG thank you is due to TALISMAN, my publishers for this!! – with almost 200 mostly archival images is a plus.

View of the Singapore Harbour and the HSBC Tower, early 1900s. In PEOPLE & PLACES. [Author’s Collection.]

Fullerton Hotel today. In MONUMENTS & ARCHITECTURE. [Photograph by the author.]

Malay woman, Singapore. c 1903. In CULTURES & COMMUNITIES. [Collection of the National Museum of Singapore.]

Tepak sireh, Surabaya, 19th century. In ARTS & LEISURE. [Collection of the Asian Civilisations Museum.]

Black-capped Kingfisher. William Farquhar Collection of Natural History Drawings. Malacca, early 19th century. In FLORA & FAUNA. [Collection of the National Museum of Singapore.]
The reference to 1819 was important because I wanted to make the point that colonial-era, British heritage is very much still an integral part of Singapore’s heritage. Who we are today is inextricable from who we were in the aftermath of 1819, when that most doughty official of the Honourable (English) East India Company planted the Union Jack on our shores.
That might seem obvious, given that Singapore – unlike many of its Southeast Asian and Asian neighbours – has retained much of its colonial heritage in its urban landscape and way of life (high tea, anyone?); and it (wisely) did not choose a violently anti-colonial path to statehood.
But there is an increasing discomfort with anything that is colonial, and an unwillingness to re-examine this aspect of our past critically to extract values and glean learning points that will prove to still be relevant today.
That is a shame, because if there’s one unique and distinguishing feature of Singapore and its recent history, it is that we have stood apart from every other nation-state in Asia in reconciling ourselves with and assimilating the colonial past as part of OUR past. This acceptance of the East-West character of our history and our identity is what has made us an exception and exceptional in Asia, and even the world.
And so therefore, chapters on “The British (and Other Europeans)”, and “Cricket in Singapore” appear alongside more readily accepted aspects of our European colonial heritage – those numerous neo-classical buildings that have been immaculately preserved as National Monuments.

British gentlemen with Chinese servants, late 19th century. [Collection of the National Museum of Singapore.]

Singapore Cricket Club, early 1900s. [Author’s Collection.]
This is yet another aspect of Singapore’s heritage that we have increasingly, conveniently forgotten, as we have leapfrogged Southeast Asia to become more North American and North Asian (read: Chinese and Korean) in outlook.
I felt I very much needed to emphasise our Malay roots, in terms of archaeology, folklore, myth and legend, historic sites, literary epics, arts and material culture – in order to maintain a firm equilibrium between the colonial and local; between West and East, but also to, once again, make a point that we cannot escape our geography.
Malay-ness, also doesn’t automatically equate Malay-Muslim. In parts of the book, I reach back further, to a time when the Malay Archipelago was a Hindu-Buddhist archipelago. Traces of that past remain in Java today in the form of the sacred temple-mountains of Borobudur and Prambanan, and the Javanese tradition of wayang kulit or shadow puppetry, which is based on the Hindu epic, the Ramayana.
Incidentally, the Ramayana, and wayang kulit also form parts of Singapore’s own heritage, and the traces of the Hindu-Buddhist past also remain in the form of that enigmatic (and enigmatically named) “Majapahit Gold” that sits in the galleries of the National Museum of Singapore.

Makam Puteri Radin Mas Ayu. [Photograph by the author.]

Istana Kampong Gelam, today’s Malay Heritage Centre. [Photograph by the author.]

Pages from the Sejarah Melayu – the Malay Annals – written in jawi script. 1896. [Collection of the National Museum of Singapore.]

Wayang kulit puppet figure of the monkey god Hanoman. Java, 20th century. [Collection of the Asian Civilisations Museum.]

Gold armlet and earrings – the so-called “Mahapahit Gold”, 14th century. [Collection of the National Museum of Singapore.]
I am happy to say that the port city of the 1800s and 1900s, and perhaps even the older, pre-colonial port settlement buried deep within the recesses of Fort Canning and Empress Place, still rears its colourful, global, cross-cultural head up in today’s gleaming, hyper-modern, super-efficient city-state.
The spirit and legacy of Singapore 1819 lives on.

View of Singapore Harbour in the 1830s. Anonymous painter, Canton. [Collection of the Asian Civilisations Museum.]

View of Singapore from Government Hall, by John Turnbull Thomson. Lithograph, 1846. [Collection of the National Museum of Singapore.]

Palm Valley, Singapore Botanic Gardens. Singapore’s first and thus-far only UNESCO World Heritage Site. [Photography by the author.]

Boat Quay today, with the towering skyscrapers of Raffles Place dwarfing historic godowns.

SINGAPORE 1819 – A LIVING LEGACY, by Kennie Ting. Published by TALISMAN Singapore.
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