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The Temasek Timeline - Singapore's Story Before Singapore
The Temasek Timeline - Singapore's Story Before Singapore episodes
- The Austronesian Expansion Reaches the Straits
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Every time someone orders at a hawker stall in Malay, they carry forward one of the great migrations in human history.
It begins on an island far to the north, with canoes, rice and a language that would travel from Madagascar to Easter Island. How do linguists trace it? And was it really a conquest, or something far more tangled?
Season 1: Before the Lion.
Sources:
Peter Bellwood, Prehistory of the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago (1997)
Ian Glover & Peter Bellwood (eds.), Southeast Asia: From Prehistory to History (2004)
From Serai Tour Services. seraitour.com/temasek-timeline
14 min - The First People of Sundaland
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Every history needs a starting cast. This one left behind stone tools, shell heaps and very little else.
Meet the Hoabinhian: a toolmaking tradition named after an ordinary Vietnamese village, yet spread across tens of thousands of years. Who were they? Why is there no confirmed trace of them on Singapore itself? And who might still carry their ancestry today?
Season 1: Before the Lion.
Sources:
Charles Higham, The Archaeology of Mainland Southeast Asia (1989)
Peter Bellwood, Prehistory of the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago (1997)
Ian Glover & Peter Bellwood (eds.), Southeast Asia: From Prehistory to History (2004)
From Serai Tour Services. seraitour.com/temasek-timeline
13 min - Singapore in the Ice Age: Walking to Sumatra
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Twenty thousand years ago, you could set out from where Singapore now stands and walk to Sumatra without wetting your feet.
Beneath today's busy straits lies a vanished continent. What did it look like? Who crossed it? And how quickly did the sea take it back?
Season 1: Before the Lion.
Sources:
Bird, Taylor & Hunt, "Palaeoenvironments of Insular Southeast Asia during the Last Glacial Period," Quaternary Science Reviews 24 (2005)
Peter Bellwood, Prehistory of the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago (1997)
From Serai Tour Services. seraitour.com/temasek-timeline
15 min - How Singapore Island Was Formed
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Before Temasek. Before Singapura. Before anyone named this place at all, something had already decided its shape.
Strip away the towers, the cranes and the reclaimed shoreline, and what's left is rock: older and stranger than the city on top of it. Why has this island never trembled like its neighbours? And what did a hill, a river mouth and a slow-moving sea have to do with everything that came later?
Season 1: Before the Lion.
Sources:
Avijit Gupta (ed.), The Physical Geography of Southeast Asia (2005)
Bird, Taylor & Hunt, "Palaeoenvironments of Insular Southeast Asia during the Last Glacial Period," Quaternary Science Reviews 24 (2005)
From Serai Tour Services. seraitour.com/temasek-timeline
13 min - Welcome to The Temasek Timeline
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Ask most people when Singapore's story begins and you'll hear one date: 1819. This welcome episode explains why that's only the last chapter, and what a thousand years of earlier history looks like when you go looking for it.
Start here for what the show is, how it works, and where the evidence ends and the legend begins. Then go back to the very beginning: before the lion, before the city, and before even the island.
From Serai Tour Services. Corrections, sources and family stories are welcome. Visit seraitour.com/temasek-timeline.
6 min
About The Temasek Timeline - Singapore's Story Before Singapore
From the publisher's feed
Every city has a founding story. Singapore's is told so well that most people stop listening at 1819.
But the island was here long before that date. Sailors were plying these waters more than…
a thousand years before Raffles arrived. A city rose on a hill, grew rich, and was gone before Europe had even found the sea route east. Kings claimed it, rivals razed it, sea peoples held it, and chroniclers writing in ancient languages recorded it. Sometimes they told the truth, and sometimes they had reasons not to.
The Temasek Timeline is that story, told from the very beginning. A story of princes and pretenders, of traders who crossed oceans on the wind, and of a strait so narrow and valuable that whoever held it held the fortunes of half the known world. It is also a story about what survives. A few lines in a court chronicle. A traveller's notes from an earlier century. Gold buried in the soil of a hill. A broken inscription that no one has ever been able to read.
Chronicles, court poems, travellers' logs, colonial archives and the ground itself all have something to say about this island. They rarely agree. Somewhere between legend and evidence, the real story is waiting.
The Temasek Timeline comes from Serai Tour Services, a Singapore heritage company that leads storywalks through the city's streets, gardens and quieter corners. On foot, we bring guests to the places where the past happened. Here, we go where no walk can reach: down through the centuries buried beneath the city.
If you know a source we have missed, or a family story or a legend handed down in your own household, we would love to hear it. History, as always, is still being discovered.
Start at the beginning, before the lion, before the city, and before even the island.