Photo: ‘Singapore and the Silk Road of the Sea’ is a recent work of Professor John N. Miksic, who advised the government on the new secondary school textbook
According to a new secondary school textbook, the history of Singapore dates back 500 years earlier than what’s been previously taught.
The new school text, Singapore: The Making of a Nation State, 1300-1975, is partly the result of NUS archaeology professor John N. Miksic’s major excavation works here, which over the past 30 years have uncovered eight tonnes of artifacts proving the island-city-state’s precolonial existence.
On why it took so long for the story of these early successful days to be written, Professor Miksic, who recently released his own book Singapore and the Silk Road of the Sea, said, “it takes overwhelming evidence to shift the mind-set of a people from one image of its past to another”.
A Yale-NUS College professor Derek Heng also contributed, saying that another probable cause for the delay in changing the narrative was “the government’s fears of communal conflict”.
“There was a deliberate attempt not to talk about links to the ethnicity of the past. Now we are more confident to say we were once a Malay polity cutting straight down through Asia,” he said.
Find out why the best time to release this new information about Singapore’s history pre-Stamford Raffles is now, on The New York Times.
