Rigel Kent

James Charles Jackson received his doctorate from the Department of Geography, University of Malaya in 1965. Planters and Speculators is adapted from his PhD thesis entitled “Chinese and European agricultural enterprise in Malaya, 1786-1921: a geographical study of expansion and change." At the close of the eighteenth century the Malay Peninsula was a scantily-populated, jungle-covered wilderness politically divided into a series of small states of varying degrees of independence and isolation. Settlement was restricted to small, traditionally-organised and often temporary Malay coastal and riverine kampongs, to a few diminutive mining centres in the foothills and to a shifting aboriginal population elsewhere. Internal communication was limited to the rivers and occasional jungle-tracks, and the peninsula produced little for export to the outside world save small quantities of tin; gold and jungle produce. It was a region almost totally devoid of export-orientated agricult

( Monday, 4 February 1822 ) On the stony point which forms the western side of the entrance of the salt creek, on which the modern town of Singapore is building, there was discovered, two years ago, a tolerably hard block of sand-stone, with an inscription upon it. One part of the Singapore Stone, currently on display at the entrance of the National Museum of Singapore. Other pieces of the original epitaph are believed to be at the Indian Museum of Calcutta . The epitaph was destroyed by the British in 1843 but a few fragments with inscriptions were rescued and shipped to Royal Asiatic Society in Calcutta for decipherment. This I examined early this morning. The stone, in shape, is a rude mass, and formed of the one-half of a great nodule broken into two nearly equal parts by artificial means; for the two portions now face each other, separated at the base by a distance of not more than two feet and a half, and reclining opposite to each other at angle of about forty de

( Sunday, 3 February 1822 ) I walked this morning round the walls and limits of the ancient town of Singapore, for such in reality had been the site of our modern settlement. It was bounded to the east by the sea ( BR ), to the north by a wall ( RMN ), and to the west by a salt creek or inlet of the sea ( NCB ). The inclosed space is a plain, ending in a hill of considerable extent, and a hundred and fifty feet in height. The whole is a kind of triangle, of which the base is the sea-side, about a mile in length The length of the shoreline estimated by Crawfurd is probably incorrect since the length of BR is approximately half-a-mile. In order to match Crawfurd's description, we need to extend the shoreline to Point A . From Point A , we can then draw a nice straight line to the base of the hill, N . If this reconstruction is correct, then AMN should form the line of the old Malay Wall. Since RMN is the actual line of the old Malay Wall, Crawfurd's original descript

The book collection of scholar Hsü Yün Ts‘iao 許雲樵, subject of much controversy, will not leave Singapore after all. A private library will be set up in Lim Teck Kim Road, off Cantonment Road, specially for the 30,000 books, periodicals and newspaper clippings, most of which are Southeast Asian history. China trip. The library will be financed and administered by a proposed company, the driving force of which is Mr. Kho Bak Weng 許木榮, assistant managing director of Sindo Timber Enterprises Pte Ltd 森都公司. Mr Hsü, 76, had planned to sell his collection to the Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA) 馬來西亞馬華公會 in Kuala Lumpur for $150,000. Local libraries, he said, were not interested in the collection which he wanted to sell as a “package deal". The books are of no great use to him because of his poor health, he said, and the money would pay for a trip to China. Mr Kho said on Tuesday that he telephoned Mr. Hsu's son immediately after reading newspaper reports about 10 da