Rigel Kent

Those of you reading this book all have one marketable asset in common, a knowledge of the English language. If you are earning a living this asset probably adds at least $300 a year to your income. Most of you did not acquire this source of income in the ordinary process of growing up. It was the result of an investment by your father and probably a larger investment by the Government. You probably have other assets of this kind too, built up by an investment in your hands or brain. Sultan Abu Bakar’s father evidently made a prudent choice by investing in his son’s English education, whereas Sultan Ali clearly miscalculated in charting the educational path for his children. As history later showed, this misstep proved disastrous for the House of Hussein, founded by the eldest son of Mahmud III (d. 1811), who had been installed by Raffles in 1819. The same rational judgment was upheld by Sultan Ibrahim (b. 1873, d...

By misreading the Lotus Sutra, Chen De'an 陳德安 (b. 538, d. 597), a Tiantai 天台 patriarch, became the first Buddhist scholar-priest to assign a numerical measure (3,000 years) to the rarity of the blooming of udumbara flower 優曇華 , though this figure was probably intended to be rhetorical rather than literal. Chen was apparently no Chakravartin, and, unsurprisingly, no biologist. If we assume that the authors of the Lotus Sutra was aware of the fact that the Udumbaras are actually enclosed within a fruity shell, then perhaps their lament was less about the rarity of the flower itself and more about the difficulty of finding someone sufficiently knowledgeable in botany to recognize that the Udumbara is a hypanthium 内華, and therefore technically distinct from ordinary flowers. Many years ago, C. N. Parkinson, the first Raffles Professor of History at the University of Malaya, warned ...

Spanning 1,723 days between 11 August 1786 and 1 May 1791, Light navigated a delicate path. He did not actively try to con the Sultan, though he could easily have bluffed his way through and closed the negotiation on that faithful Monday 1 , during his first audience with the king. He did not do that. Sultan Abdullah, ever cautious and meticulous, insisted on having Macpherson’s reply translated three times independently, using the versions to cross-check a point he had misread in his initial reading. On 8 July 1786, Sultan Abdullah read the Malay translation to Light and pressed him to sign on the document. The king advised him to set aside the plan of settling in Penang, in order to avoid unnecessary expenses should the project fail to materialize. 2 When the Dato Laksamana pressed Light to confirm the annual payment of tiga laksa rials (or some fixed figure he could commit to) and to explain whether a Plan B...