Thursday, January 25, 2007

Who Really 'founded' Singapore

Base on what I know, I think that it was Sir Stamford Raffles who found Singapore.
Raffles was the one leading Farquhar and his assistants in the hunt for a new trading settlement as their ports at Penang and Bencoolen were far away from the main tradind area in the Malay Archipelago. Raffles spotted Singapore and were convinced that it would be an ideal place as a port. He then signed a treaty with Tengku Hussein whom he recognized as the real Sultan. It was also because of Raffles persistence that allowed the British to keep Singapore and established it to become one of the world’s busiest port.
Although Farquhar solved many problems such as attracting people to come to Singapore and sell their food, started a small police force to keep law and order but there were too few policemen, inviting new settlers to come to Singapore and also paid people to kill rats and centipedes. All these were important but his contribution was still smaller compared to Raffles’.
What John Crawfurd did was to sign a treaty and thus I do not think that he was the one who founded Singapore.

2 comments:

Friendship last foreva.... said...

a great comment... well done.

cHen yaN said...

It's a gud post~
Enjoy reading___