<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width="100%" border=0><TBODY><TR>S'pore pre-Raffles no sleepy fishing village
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<!-- START OF : div id="storytext"--><!-- more than 4 paragraphs -->I REFER to Mr Tan Yip Meng's letter on Tuesday, 'Back to the future, a sleepy fishing village'.
His claim that Singapore was a sleepy fishing village, which is taken from our history textbooks, is incorrect. Before the arrival of Stamford Raffles, Singapore was a Malay trading port in the 14th century that welcomed traders from all over Asia. Even just before Raffles' arrival, it was not merely a sleepy fishing village and had gambier plantations worked by the Chinese.
Therefore Mr Tan's claim of the 'illusion' of a trading port, among others, cannot be true because of the artifacts that were excavated in Fort Canning and other parts of Singapore. These show a vibrant trading culture, not only among people in South-east Asia but also people from China and India, before the arrival of Raffles.
Mr Tan also claims that the nation-state paradigm, when applied to Singapore, is an illusion as Singapore is an artificial nation. However, all nation-states are created artificially by man, and no nation-state, or even state, could exist if not for the decisions and actions of man to create one.
Concepts and ideas like nationalism and citizenship, which are the foundation of any nation-state in the world, were also created by man. So if Singapore is an illusion, so are other nation-states.
While it is true that Singapore, due to its physical limitations, requires itself to be unique in what it offers to other countries and major corporations, I do not believe a one-party dominant system is as unique as Mr Tan thinks it is.
Because of this, I firmly believe that, even with a two-party or multi-party system in place, Singapore will survive and even prosper as long as it remains a hub where goods, information, ideas and people flow in and out, similar to what happened here before the arrival of Raffles in 1819. Han Mingguang
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<!-- START OF : div id="storytext"--><!-- more than 4 paragraphs -->I REFER to Mr Tan Yip Meng's letter on Tuesday, 'Back to the future, a sleepy fishing village'.
His claim that Singapore was a sleepy fishing village, which is taken from our history textbooks, is incorrect. Before the arrival of Stamford Raffles, Singapore was a Malay trading port in the 14th century that welcomed traders from all over Asia. Even just before Raffles' arrival, it was not merely a sleepy fishing village and had gambier plantations worked by the Chinese.
Therefore Mr Tan's claim of the 'illusion' of a trading port, among others, cannot be true because of the artifacts that were excavated in Fort Canning and other parts of Singapore. These show a vibrant trading culture, not only among people in South-east Asia but also people from China and India, before the arrival of Raffles.
Mr Tan also claims that the nation-state paradigm, when applied to Singapore, is an illusion as Singapore is an artificial nation. However, all nation-states are created artificially by man, and no nation-state, or even state, could exist if not for the decisions and actions of man to create one.
Concepts and ideas like nationalism and citizenship, which are the foundation of any nation-state in the world, were also created by man. So if Singapore is an illusion, so are other nation-states.
While it is true that Singapore, due to its physical limitations, requires itself to be unique in what it offers to other countries and major corporations, I do not believe a one-party dominant system is as unique as Mr Tan thinks it is.
Because of this, I firmly believe that, even with a two-party or multi-party system in place, Singapore will survive and even prosper as long as it remains a hub where goods, information, ideas and people flow in and out, similar to what happened here before the arrival of Raffles in 1819. Han Mingguang
