Singapore Unlikely Power Chapter 1 - Origins of a Sea Trading Hub

Perry opens this chapter with a line that stuck with me: “An equatorial jungle swamp provides an unpromising spawning ground for a world-class city.”

That’s basically the whole Singapore puzzle right there. Before Singapore, no global city had ever emerged in the tropics. And none has since. So how did this little island pull it off? Chapter one takes us way back to find out.

Sea People and Jungle Swamps

Thousands of years ago, the Melaka Straits were home to scattered groups of people known as the Orang Laut, literally “Sea People.” These were nomadic seafarers who lived where land meets water. They fished, gathered shellfish, and built small boats that doubled as their homes. Think of them as the original Singaporeans.

Here’s the thing about the Orang Laut. They were incredibly capable. They could dive underwater for what seemed like forever. Europeans who observed them were amazed. They knew every current, every coastline, every wind pattern in the region. Their boats came from hollowed-out tree trunks and eventually evolved into the Malay prau, which came in dozens of forms, from simple sampans to heavily rigged sailing ships.

And they were healthier than the Europeans who would later show up. Living on the water meant good hygiene. Their diet was mostly seafood and fruit, heavy on protein, light on the processed junk that was already making Europeans sick in their crowded cities. They even chewed betel, which stained their teeth but fought tooth decay. Not a bad trade.

Perry makes an interesting point about piracy here. Europeans loved to label the Orang Laut as pirates. But that’s oversimplified. The Orang Laut weren’t usually the ones starting pirate operations. They got recruited for their skills by wealthier Malays who had the capital to build big raiding vessels. Piracy in the region carried no stigma. Successful pirates gained respect and loot, just like England’s Sir Francis Drake. Part-time piracy was basically a side gig that people picked up when times were tough and dropped when the economy improved. Sound familiar?

Temasek: Singapore Before Singapore

Before the name “Singapore” existed, there was Temasek. According to legend, a visitor fleeing Java landed on the island, spotted an animal with a black head and red body, decided it was a lion, and named the place “Singapura,” which is Sanskrit for “lion city.” No actual lions lived there, of course. But legends don’t need to be accurate. They just need to stick.

Temasek flourished in the fourteenth century as a trading town at the mouth of a small river. Archaeologists have found the remains of a terraced hill with a palace, market, defenses, an earthen rampart, and a moat. There were Buddhist temples made of baked brick and stone. Chinese residents lived alongside local Malays, possibly forming the first Overseas Chinese community in Southeast Asia.

The town sat on international trade routes stretching to Java, Thailand, India, and China. It was part of what Perry calls the “ceramic route,” a maritime equivalent of the Silk Road. Heavy, delicate Chinese porcelain could only travel in volume by sea. In exchange, Temasek exported hornbill casques, a bird ivory the Chinese called “yellow jade” and prized for carving.

But here’s the problem. Temasek was caught between two larger powers: Siam and Java-Sumatra. When the squeeze got too tight, the ruler fled. The population followed. The whole thing lasted only about a century.

Perry drops a detail that really bugged me. During the early British colonial era, much of Temasek’s archaeological evidence was destroyed in the rush for development. That destruction helped create the myth that nothing existed in Singapore before the British arrived in 1819. Wrong. There was a real city there, hundreds of years earlier.

And here’s a fun bit of modern trivia. The name “Temasek” lives on today as one of Singapore’s sovereign wealth funds. Ancient trading town name, meet twenty-first century investment vehicle.

Melaka: The Hinge of Eurasia

When Temasek’s rulers fled, they ended up about 127 miles away in Melaka. The name comes from Arabic, meaning “meeting place.” And that’s exactly what it became.

Melaka was a trading city that depended almost entirely on commerce. The soil was poor, the hinterland was untamed jungle, and even basic food had to be imported. But its location was perfect. It sat on the direct trade route between the Indonesian spice islands and Alexandria, the Egyptian port that fed Venice, the European spice distributor.

At its peak in the fifteenth century, Melaka was possibly comparable in population to London. The city was wildly multicultural. Perry lists the cast of characters: Chinese, Javanese, Tagalogs, Persians, South Indian Tamils, Gulf Arabs, Gujerati Indians, Armenians, and Jews. A Portuguese traveler claimed he could hear eighty-four languages being spoken. Malay served as the lingua franca, just as it would later in Singapore.

Each ethnic group had its specialty. Persians dealt in gems and drugs. Gujerati Indians were known as mariners. The Bugis from eastern Indonesia were famous for two things: trading and violence. Their name would later become attached to a street in Singapore notorious for drunken sailors and transvestites. Only recently has Bugis Street been cleaned up.

An early European visitor called the straits Asia’s “gullet” and declared that “Whoever is lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice.” If Venice was the hinge of Europe, Perry suggests, then Melaka was the hinge of Eurasia. That’s a great line.

The Chinese Connection

So how did modern Singapore end up three-quarters Chinese in a region that was overwhelmingly Malay? Perry starts answering that question by looking at south China’s coastline. Broken and full of harbors, it encouraged people to take to the sea. The Chinese government, focused on defending land borders from nomads in the north, mostly ignored what happened on the coast.

So regular people just went for it. They emigrated, traded, and built communities across Southeast Asia. They brought skills with them. They taught mining techniques, showed local farmers better rice cultivation methods, introduced soybeans and cabbages, and produced those huge ceramic storage jars you still see in Southeast Asian bathrooms today.

The junk was their ship of choice. And here Perry reveals something I didn’t know. More than a thousand years ago, Chinese shipbuilders were using watertight bulkheads, adjustable rudders, and double-planked hulls. Europeans didn’t catch up on the bulkhead technology until they started building iron ships in the 1800s. That’s an enormous head start.

Zheng He: Gunboat Diplomacy Before the Term Existed

The chapter ends with Zheng He, the Ming Dynasty eunuch admiral who led seven massive expeditions between 1405 and 1433, reaching as far as Africa. He commanded fleets carrying up to thirty thousand people, most of them soldiers. His troops outnumbered the entire standing army of the king of France.

Today, China promotes Zheng He as an “envoy of friendship and culture.” Perry isn’t buying it. Beneath the silk banners and diplomatic language, Zheng He’s ships carried gunpowder weapons. He kidnapped the monarch of a Sri Lankan state and hauled him back to China. This was gunboat diplomacy centuries before anyone coined the phrase.

So here’s what happened after the voyages ended. Nothing. The expeditions were an imperial vanity project. They increased Chinese knowledge of Southeast Asia but had zero lasting political or strategic impact. Meanwhile, private Chinese emigrants kept quietly building trade networks across the region. Those networks would matter far more than any government fleet.

Perry’s closing thought for the chapter lands well. European seafarers, with far smaller ships and far fewer numbers, would change history less than a hundred years later. Their arrival would eventually lead to “the coupling of British political order with Chinese entrepreneurship and the birth of modern Singapore.”

That coupling is what the rest of the book builds toward. But it all started here, with sea people, jungle swamps, and the monsoon winds.

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