Who ruled Singapore?

Singapore occupies a small island off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, beside the narrow sea lanes where the Strait of Malacca opens towards the South China Sea. Nearly all shipping between the Indian Ocean and East Asia has to pass close by, and that location has made and remade the city several times. Its history falls into two main chapters: a medieval trading port that faded away by the 1500s, and a British free port founded in 1819 that grew into one of the world's busiest harbours and, since 1965, an independent city-state.

The island lay within the trading world of Srivijaya, the maritime power based in Sumatra, though there is little evidence of a substantial town before the fourteenth century. By then a settlement called Temasek, or Tumasik, appears in Javanese and Chinese sources; the Javanese court poem Nagarakretagama of 1365 lists it, and the Chinese traveller Wang Dayuan described a port at the harbour entrance around 1330. The Malay Annals tell of a Palembang prince who founded a kingdom here and renamed it Singapura, the lion city. Excavations on Fort Canning hill have found Chinese ceramics, coins and traces of workshops from this period.

Caught between Majapahit in Java and the Siamese kingdom of Ayutthaya, the port was attacked near the end of the fourteenth century, and its last ruler, Parameswara, fled north to found Malacca. The island then fell within the Malacca and later Johor sultanates. A Portuguese raid in 1613 burned an outpost at the mouth of the Singapore River, and for two centuries afterwards the island had only a few fishing and sea-faring communities.

In January 1819 Stamford Raffles of the British East India Company landed at the river mouth, looking for a base to challenge Dutch control of the region's trade. On 6 February he signed a treaty with Hussein Shah, whom the British recognised as sultan of Johor, and the local chief, the Temenggong. Raffles made it a free port with no duties, and merchants and labourers arrived from China, India, the Malay world and the Arab lands. The Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824 confirmed British possession, and from 1826 Singapore formed part of the Straits Settlements with Penang and Malacca, which became a Crown colony in 1867. Steamships and the Suez Canal, opened in 1869, made it a coaling and trading hub of the British Empire, exporting tin and rubber from the Malay hinterland.

Britain built a large naval base in the 1930s, but on 15 February 1942 the garrison surrendered to Japanese forces that had advanced down the peninsula, one of the worst defeats in British military history. Under the occupation the island was renamed Syonan-to, and thousands of Chinese residents were killed in the Sook Ching massacres.

After 1945 Singapore became a separate Crown colony and won internal self-government in 1959, when Lee Kuan Yew's People's Action Party took office. It joined the new federation of Malaysia in September 1963, but political and racial tensions led to its separation, and on 9 August 1965 it became an independent republic. The site's maps show it as part of Malaya or Malaysia in later decades because of the coarse borders; in fact it has been a sovereign state since 1965. Rapid industrialisation, public housing and a huge container port followed, and Singapore today has about six million people and is one of Asia's main financial and shipping centres.