Romancing the Stone

On sighting the title of this post, I suspect some readers might have imagined a scene from the 1980's Hollywood movie of the same name, starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner. Sorry to disappoint, but take comfort that this post is about a significant historical mystery relating to Singapore's early days.

About a year after "Singapore was established" (presumably meaning after 1819) , a large slab of inscribed rock - about 10 feet high, 9-10 feet long and 6 feet wide - was discovered near the banks of the Singapore River. The inscriptions were in an unknown character. Till today, no conclusion has been reached on what the inscriptions actually mean. It has been speculated that they are in either Sanskrit or Old Javanese or early Ceylonese or Tamil, and date back to between 11th and 13th centuries. In the famous book "Hikayat Abdullah", author Munshi Abdullah described early attempts to decipher the inscription:

"Many learned men came and tried to read it. Some brought flour paste which they pressed on the inscription and took a cast, others rubbed lamp-black on it to make the lettering visible. But for all that they exhausted their ingenuity in trying to find out what language the letters represented, they reached no decision. There the stone rested until recently with its inscriptions in relief. It was Mr Raffles' opinion that the writing must be Hindu because the Hindus were the oldest of all immigrant races in the East, reaching Java and Bali and Siam, the inhabitants of which are all descendants from them. However, not a single person in all Singapore was able to interpret the words chiseled on the rock. Allah only knows ..."

Fig 1: The Singapore Stone

The large rock no longer exists. In 1843 it was dynamited to pieces by a British engineer, during a public works programme to widen the river mouth, and to clear space for a new fort and officers' residences. Some of the pieces became gravel for road works. Others were removed from Singapore. Only a small fragment, now called the Singapore Stone, remains in the National Museum of Singapore (see Fig 1).

There have been mythical tales told about the Singapore Stone. The "Sejarah Melayu" tells of a Singapura war chief and strong man named Badang who planted the enormous stone at the mouth of the Singapore River, as part of a series of challenges from another strong man from Kalinga in India. Here's a picture from a Singapore school history textbook which shows Badang lifting and flinging the stone so far into the air that it landed on the far bank of the river.

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Fig 2: Badang throwing the stone

(from "Singapore - From Settlement to Nation, Pre-1819 to 1971")

Coming back to the mysterious inscriptions on the Singapore Stone, the following two photographs show close-up views of the Singapore Stone. Due to years of exposure and damage by the elements, much of the surface is worn and the inscriptions unclear, but one can still make them out in certain places.

Fig 3: Inscriptions on the Singapore Stone

Fig 4: Artist rendering of one section of the inscriptions

And so there it sits quietly in the National Museum. So many questions are left unanswered ... 

• What did the inscriptions say?
• Who carved the inscriptions?
• What was the language? 
• (Extra-terrestrial believers might even ask: could the originators of the inscriptions be from out of this planet?)
• If the huge rock had not been blown up in 1843, would we have enough clues today (especially with modern technology) to decipher the message?
• What would it have told us about life in early Singapura?

Over the years, many scholars have attempted to uncover the secrets of the stone, but to no avail. Anyone of you readers want to try?