1. Sequent Occupance
Cultural Ecology is an important sub-discipline within Human Geography. Stemming from anthropological studies concerned over how human societies are affected by changes to the environment they live in, Cultural Ecology is the “theoretical perspective common to cultural geography and derived from anthropology that focuses on the relationship between human activity and environmental conditions.” [
1] (p. 282). This sub-discipline had its most influential figure in Carl Sauer (1889–1975) who, in his seminal work
The Morphology of Landscape, called for a more refined approach to the study of the impact humans have on the environment. Sauer applied a cyclical idea to Geography according to the notion of “landscape-as-history” rather than the “landscape-as-nature” approach [
2] (p. 36). According to Denevan [
2] (p. 36), “Sauer transferred Spengler’s line of thought about the cyclical nature of civilizations to the landscape. In that line of thinking, each place (i.e., landscape) formed a stage on which a succession of different cultures through time had left subtle traces on the land as in a palimpsest.”
Hanks [
1] (p. 254) summarized Sauer’s thoughts in “that cultures are the unique result of a collection of influences, but especially are shaped by those cultural patterns that were previously present in the landscape.” Hanks goes on to say that “Sauer became the most influential figure in American cultural geography, and his emphasis on a particularist approach to the study of landscapes remains at the heart of the discipline today” [
1] (p. 254; for an exhaustive review of Sauer’s work, see [
3]).
An important component of Cultural Ecology is the concept of Sequent Occupance. Whittlesey, strongly influenced by Sauer’s teachings, proposed that
In fact, the distribution of people and of their activities over the surface of an earth of varied forms, conditions, and resources, is conceded to be the major premise of anthropogeography, human geography, or chorology, as it is variously called. These spatial concepts remain purely descriptive, however, unless they are treated dynamically, i.e., unless the time factor is cognized. The view of geography as a succession of stages of human occupance establishes the genetics of each stage in terms of its predecessor. [
4] (p. 162)
Hanks [
1] (p. 306) defines Sequent Occupance as “the notion that landscapes are shaped over time by the sequential settlement, or at least sequential use, of that landscape by various groups who occupy the land. Thus, according to the proponents of this approach to landscape study, a place can be understood only through an examination of the historical impact of such occupation, and a comprehension of the nature of the culture at each stage of occupation.”
Hanks [
1] (p. 307) also recognizes the importance of Sequent Occupance in Historical Geography and that “in some cases the historical patterns of settlement of a place may be partially revealed through a study of the local toponymy, which frequently carries clues to the history of previous cultural occupants as well as to a place’s former function on the landscape.” Meyer [
5] is among the first researchers to highlight the significance of Toponymy in Sequent Occupance studies. In his article on the place names of the Calumet region in Northwest Indiana-Northeast Illinois, he states: “There occurred to us the idea that a toponomic (sic) study might take on increasing geographic significance if we attempt a partial chronologic-chorographic treatment of place names in addition to merely identifying place nomenclature, thus contributing to our knowledge of the progress of regional settlement and economic development.” [
5] (p. 142).
It “occurred” to us as well that a study of Singapore’s Toponymy might contribute to the expanding knowledge of the history of this small island state.
2. Sequent Occupance and Singapore
The toponyms associated with its name over its history reflect Singapore’s Sequent Occupance context. The names manifest a continuous Malayic occupance from (perhaps) as early as the 3rd Century CE, with varied influences by the major political players in the region, Sumatran, Javanese, Indian, etc. until the arrival of the Europeans and the British, who established a settlement that led to the multilingual and multi-ethnic metropolis of today.
Hsü Yün-ts’iao (Xǔ Yúnqiáo) [
6] claims to have uncovered the term
Pulau Ujong. He claims it to be “the oldest name for Singapore” (p. 9) in the accounts of the voyages by Blazon Officer Chu Ying (Zhū Yìng) (宣化從事朱應) and Adjutant Kāng Tài (中郎康泰), who were sent on a mission to the South Seas by General Lǚ Tai (Lǚ Dài) (呂岱) of the Wú Kingdom (吳國), who was the Governor-General of Canton and Vietnam at around 231 CE. In these accounts, Hsü Yün-ts’iao came across two refences to
P’u-lo chung (
Púluō zhōng) (蒲羅中) and
P’u-lo chung ((
Púluō zhōng guó)
state (蒲羅中國). Hsü Yün-ts’iao goes on to affirm that “
P’u-lo chung - The earliest name of Singapore in remote days, and should correspond to
Pulau Ujong in Malay, the island on the extremity of the peninsula. It reminds us of
Johor’s old name,
Ujong Tanah, “the extremity of land”. Therefore,
Púluō is the transliteration of the Malay word
pulau “island” and
chung corresponds to
ujong.” (p. 9).
Historical records tell of a place originally named
Temasek or
Temasik. Wang Dayuan, a Chinese traveller, chronicled his voyages in the 1300s [
7] and visited the island at around 1330. He referred to it as
Dānmǎxī (單馬錫). Hsü Yün-ts’iao (Xǔ Yúnqiáo) [
6] reports the name in Wang Dayuan’s chronicles as
Tan-Ma-Hsi (單馬錫) and states that the same term “also appeared in Cheng Ho’s chart (鄭和航海圖 Cheng-ho hang-hai t’u [Zhèng Hé hánghǎi tú]) given in Mao Yüan-yi’s (Máo Yuányí) (茅元儀) Wu pei chih (Wǔ bèi zhì) (武備志), volume 240, with the same pronunciation, but with different characters, as 淡馬錫 (
Tan-ma-hsi/Tànmǎxī), which in Hokkien pronunciation is
Tam-ma-siak and more nearly corresponds to
Tumasik.” [
6] (p. 1). Gerini [
8] points out, though, that “hsi” could refer to “tin” and to a combination of the Malay
tanah “land” with Chinese
hsi (xī) “tin”, literally “land of tin” (see also [
9]).
The origin of the name
Temasek is unclear. In his
Malay-English Dictionary that R.J. Wilkinson published in 1910, he suggests that
Temasek probably derives etymologically from
tasek, a Malay word for “sea” or “lake”. With the insertion of the infix
-em-, the term could be translated as “place surrounded by the sea” [
10] (p. 183). This name also appears as
Tumasik in the Javanese epic
Nagarakretagama. The poem is written in Old Javanese and describes the
Majapahit Empire in its prime. One other possible explanation is that it was named after one of the Srivijaya Kings, Maharaja
Tan Ma Sa Na Ho, who acceded the throne of Srivijaya in 1376 [
11]. Hsü Yün-ts’iao [
6], on the other hand, suggests that the toponym could be a Greek loan word, a corruption of
Damascus (
Δαμασκός), which would have the meaning of “a well-watered land”.
Dates are difficult to ascertain, but the
Sejarah Melayu, “The Malay Annals”, a Malay literary work composed sometime between 15th and 16th centuries, tell of Sri Tri Buana, a Srivijayan prince from
Palembang who travelled to
Temasik with his Chief Minister Demang Lebar Daun and, while hunting at
Kuala Temasik “the mouth of the
Temasik River” (in the place now known as the
Padang; this seems to be the first reference to the
Singapore River), saw an unfamiliar animal. Demang Lebar Daun observed that, based on what he had heard, the animal was a lion. At this point, Sri Tri Buana decided to establish a city at
Temasik and call it
Singapura, or “Lion City” [
10] (p. 150). Chronologically, Gerini [
8] places this event at around 1284. This “is, of course, far more ornate and glowing, quite in the style that suits native fancy” [
8] (p. 506). Gerini, therefore, argues for:
the early presence on the island of immigrants from a country—whether the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra, or Java—that had received Indu civilization; and that temple (see the section on
Fort Canning below) may have been the
pura or
puri that received the name of
Siṁha (“lion”) and caused the neighbouring village to be called therefrom
Siṁhapura. (Majumdar does mention, for example, that “
Siṁhapura was the capital of a
Kalinga kingdom even as late as the twelfth century AD” [
11] (p. 6). This city is in the current Indian state of
Telangana and is now known as
Singapuram). Such a designation was doubtless adopted either with a view to enhance the prestige of the foundation by naming it after an old city of India, or to perpetuate, as often occurred in many parts of Indo-China, the name of the founder, which may just have been
Siṁha. [
8] (p. 506).
Borschberg [
12] presented an exhaustive list of possible variations of the name across the last four centuries or so. The name,
Singapura was “anglicised” to
Singapore in the 1800s.
A 1604 map by the Malay-Portuguese cartographer Manuel Godinho de Erédia [
13] displays the name
xabandaria. Borschberg [
14] (p. 383) says that this means the port of
Singapore at that time was active enough to have a a
shahbandar on the island (
Shahbandar is Persian for “King of the Haven” and a more apt English equivalent is “Harbour Master”) [
15] (pp. 517–533). The Flemish merchant
Jacques Coutre, in the early 1600s, recorded visiting the “Ysla de la Sabandaria Vieja” or “Island of the Old Shahbandaria”. Borschberg [
15] claims this is a name for Singapore.
Miksic [
10] highlights how archaeological studies have shown that Singapore became an important port in the 1300s and maintained an advanced level of prosperity over the 14th century. Abshire [
16] documents a variety of accounts of this prosperous period. While the settlement declined in influence through the 15th Century, it was still an important port well into the 17th Century [
14]. Abshire [
16] posits that the decline of
Singapura in the 15th Century was due to the development of the stronger Kingdom of Melaka at that time.
3. Recognized Stages of Sequent Occupance in Singapore
Archaeological and other historical evidence points to a Malay settlement existing in Singapore in the 1300s. Miksic [
10] points out that
Information on ancient Singapore after 1400 is less comprehensive than for the fourteenth century, but we can use the little data we have to build a general picture of the settlement during the period of the Melaka sultanate and its successors in Johor and Riau up to about 1600. After a hiatus of about 200 years, Singapore revived when a new settlement was founded around the river mouth in 1811, followed by the start of the colonial period in 1819. While the archaeology of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Singapore is a separate topic, comparisons between precolonial and colonial Singapore show how life in a port with a sizeable overseas Chinese community differed between two eras separated by 500 years. (p. 22)
The 15th Century saw the arrival of European colonial powers in South East Asia. The most prominent of these, at that time, were the Portuguese, who conquered Melaka in 1511 [
16]. During the next 100 years or so, Singapore is repeatedly mentioned in the chronicles of various travellers, and is referred to as a ““kingdom,” but one with very little territory.” [
16] (p. 27). After a century of Portuguese presence and of various conflicts involving
Aceh (Sumatra) and
Johor groups, the next big players to arrive in South East Asia were the Dutch in the early 1600s. The next 200 years witnessed varying fortunes in the region for the Portuguese, the Dutch, the Johor Kingdom (also known as the
Johor Empire, the
Johor Sultanate, Johor-Riau,
Johor-Riau-Lingga, was a Malay kingdom which lasted from 1528 to 1855; the kingdom, in its most powerful stages, controlled today’s
Johor,
Riau,
Lingga, and much territory of southern Peninsula Malaysia, including Singapore, plus other islands off the east coast of the peninsula), and the Bugis (who were people originally from the island of Sulawesi in present day Indonesia, located between Borneo and the Maluku Islands—mainly seafarers and maritime merchants—they became very influential in the Malayan Peninsula in the 1700s; [
17] (p. 31)) from Sulawesi. During this time, Singapore was not mentioned as an active participant in the complex relations of all these parties, but was continuously referred to as a place where trading took place and an attractive place for Chinese and Indian traders to settle. Abshire [
16] (p. 35) points out that “While its (Singapore’s) fortunes rose and fell and while it may have fallen into relative obscurity as a port, compared to Melaka, Johor, or Bintan Island, some trade activities continued, proving that Singapore was in its ancient history a notable port of call in the globalized trading and shipping networks of the time.”
The year 1786 saw the British establish a port in Penang, on the Malay Peninsula, to facilitate their trade with India and China. This led to the eventual move by the British to establish a settlement in Singapore in 1819. According to Miksic [
10], Sir Stamford Raffles, rather than “founding” Singapore, “revived an ancient trading port.” (p. 20).
4. History of Toponymic Policies in Singapore
Perono Cacciafoco and Tuang [
17] point out that, while being under the British rule and, then, part of the Federation of Malaya before finally gaining independence, Singapore has experienced a number of transformations in its toponymic policies and many of its place names and street names have been modified or changed completely over time.
Yeoh [
18,
19] states how (place-)naming practices during the colonial time reflected the ideology of the British rulers, place names commemorated European states-people and public servants and did not reflect local “perceptions and priorities” [
19] (p. 300). Haughton [
20] (p. 49) reports how at the time when street signs began to appear at street corners in 1887, local Chinese, Malay, and Tamil Singaporeans referred to these places with Chinese, Malay, and Tamil names that were very different to the official ones. This was a custom during the colonial period and is still observed today among older Chinese Singaporeans who do not refer to places using the official names. For example, the suburb of
Bukit Merah, Malay for “Red Hill”, is still known by the Chinese as
ang suah, which is Hokkien for “Red Hill” [
18,
21].
Yeoh also reports [
19] that naming practices in the period just after Singapore gained independence (1965) attempted to follow the new nation’s vision of treating all the different ethnic groups (Chinese, Malay and Indian) as separate, but also equal and, at the same time, to emphasize a local Malayan identity rather than its colonial past. The Minutes of the Meeting of the Advisory Committee on the Naming of Roads and Streets (1967, cited in [
19], p. 301) show a change from the use of the names of prominent public figures to names taken from local flora and fauna and the historical or natural features of the area to be named. However, the local Malay vocabulary was soon exhausted, while, at the same time, this naming practice had many opponents among the Chinese population, who claimed to find the names difficult to pronounce or remember. Yeoh [
19] (p. 302) states that “ironically, people preferred road signage and residential addresses in English, the language of the colonial masters, which they perceived as neutral if not superior.” This strategy was also perceived as favouring one ethnic group, the Malays, over the others. In 1968, the attempt to use Malay, the National Language of Singapore, as a means to forming a unique identity was dropped in alignment with the new ideology of multilingualism and multiracialism [
19] (p. 302). The Jurong Town Council named the streets in a new industrial estate using the theme of “industrialisation” and using the four official languages of the country (in the late 1950s, Singapore adopted English, Malay, Mandarin, and Tamil as official languages) (pp. 33–48). Some examples of names used in this estate are,
Enterprise Road or
Quality Road in English;
Fan Yoong Road and
Soon Lee Road, meaning “prosperity” and “progressing smoothly” in Mandarin; the Malay
Jalan Pesawat “machinery” and
Jalan Tukang “skilled craftsmen”; and the Tamil
Neythal Road “to weave”.
Another important stage was the establishment of the Committee on the Standardisation of Street Names in Chinese in 1967. This committee’s task was to simplify and systematize “existing renderings of street names in Chinese so as to avoid confusions and unhappy transliterations […] and faithful rendering[s] by sound but should also be elegant and meaningful” (
The Straits Times 1970, cited in [
19], p. 304). The Street and Building Names Board was established in 2003 and placed under the Urban Redevelopment Authority of Singapore. It “considers and approves the naming and renaming of buildings, estates and streets proposed by building owners and developers.” [
22] (p. 2).
Singapore today has thousands of toponyms and, with the urban developments, the number of odonyms has increased exponentially [
17]. While many appellations display their more modern history, there are a number of place names whose nomenclature and use, when analysed from a historical-geographical perspective, reflect the Sequent Occupance “layout” in Singapore. The next sections will present and discuss a number of such examples.
5. Sequent Occupance and Diachronic Coexistence in Singapore Toponymy
A quick look at the multicultural and multilingual society of Singapore, as well as at the history of its urban architecture and landscape, gives the immediate idea of the meaning of Sequent Occupance in the context of the Lion City. Several peoples, in different times and for different reasons, have occupied the island and have cohabited its territory, giving birth, at least in modern times, to a melting pot of cultures able to peacefully coexist and to transform Singapore, over time. Still, besides the skyscrapers and the futuristic skyline that characterize the contemporary city, British colonial buildings, traditional Chinese houses and monuments, Indian temples, ancient streets, and heritage landmarks provide the traveller with the feeling of the crucible of cultures that have made and still make the (relatively) recent history of the Lion City.
In this context, the notion of Sequent Occupance must be necessarily analysed according to a specific—and, probably, specifically Singaporean—key of interpretation that we would like to call “diachronic coexistence”. All the cultural and material elements (at the level of heritage), indeed, coexist here and produce a unicum that emblematically witnesses the Sequent Occupance mark of the Lion City. However, this Sequent Occupance context cannot be read exactly and comprehensively without taking into account—and studying—its chronology, i.e., its history.
What is contemporary or, better, synchronic, in the urban Singapore context, is actually diachronic, and shows deep historical roots that are different, in their chronology and in their origins. Only by going back in time across centuries and only by considering different timelines, to reconstruct the exact development of the different pieces of this cultural mosaic, scholars can recover and provide an actual picture of this “diachronic coexistence”.
This is true not only in the context of the architectural and urban landscape of the Lion City, but also—prevalently—in Singapore’s Toponymy, as shown in the following sections of the present study. The coexistence of place names belonging to different cultural and linguistic contexts in the island, producing a truly unique collection of toponyms derived from different roots and attested all together, in the same time and in the same territory, cannot be explained without highlighting the naming processes existing behind those names, sometimes connected with each other, sometimes abruptly—and recently—generated because of governmental resolutions. Historical factors, like settlement dynamics and population movements, with, in relatively recent times, the phenomenon of colonization, are “mixed”, therefore, with the language planning strategies of independent Singapore (from 1965), which are reverberated into toponymic policies that have, sometimes, erased the chronology of the naming processes involving whole districts (and, especially, roads and streets) of the Lion City, changing, with a sudden continuity solution, the names—prevalently odonyms—of local areas to others without an apparent historical and/or “traditional” link to the previous Toponymy of those specific areas [
17] (pp. 9–30).
The “diachronic coexistence” of place names from different cultural and linguistic contexts, therefore, is not always properly “sequent”, in Singapore. However, the historical reconstruction and documentation of governmental choices in the replacement of place names with others through a sudden continuity solution is a valuable hermeneutic process that enables researchers to recover the diachrony of the toponymic changes in the Lion City, isolating “histories” of place names representing a diachronic continuum and other “histories” of toponyms that underwent a sudden substitution connected eminently with language policies and political factors. The two categories of place names coherently coexist, in Singapore, and their histories (and stories) are an irreplaceable part of the local culture and heritage. Their coexistence is “diachronic”, because they cannot be explained without a historical study recovering the different timelines and aspects of the naming processes that originated them.
Sometimes, when they have a “traceable history”, these names are emblematic of toponymic Sequent Occupance in Singapore; sometimes, when they have been generated “abruptly” by a governmental decision, they show an aspect of “synchronicity” proper of the Sequent Occupance notion. However, these last toponyms could be “deceptive”, in a way, since they do not properly belong to a “historical” stratum of the naming process, but they represent, nevertheless, a “historical” stage of local politics and policies. This does not “deny” the historicity of this second category of place names, but highlights their “special” and not completely “diachronic” position in the context of Singapore’s toponymic Sequent Occupance.
The following comprehensive sections of the article show the just-mentioned features and aspects of the place names of the Lion City. It is not always simple to assign Singapore’s toponyms to one of the two above highlighted categories, because, lato sensu, all the analysed names are, by definition, “historical”. However, the distinction between the two categories is represented by the “historical continuity” of the naming processes of these denominations, without an abrupt continuity solution.
A historical research like the one developed in this paper cannot ignore the notion of “Toponymic Stratigraphy” [
23] (pp. 29–47), a metaphorically archaeological methodology applied to languages and naming processes reconstructing diachronically different chronological
strata of development of a place name over time, over centuries and millennia. Despite that Singapore’s context does not always allow the recovery of very remote stages of the naming processes of local place names, an interdisciplinary study of ancient chronicles, historical maps, official or private letters by missionaries or colonizers, and archive documents often enables researchers to outline a precise diachronic sequence in the naming of Singapore places or, conversely, to highlight chronological gaps and time periods without historical attestations.
This kind of study on the place names of the Lion City has to be necessarily intensive and qualitative [
24] (pp. 65–74), and requires a deep analysis of the selected toponyms both at the linguistic and historical level. Historical maps are, in this context, a very valuable source. The assessment of misspellings or misinterpretations, over time, of local place names by cartographers provides interesting insights into possible different or alternative forms of significant toponyms (to be analysed both diachronically and synchronically) and highlights relevant phenomena of double naming of local place names or of naming and re-naming of local toponyms through the use of two different (and, sometimes, unrelated) languages (e.g., local languages and the colonizers’ languages). This linguistic aspect of the toponymic analysis, mainly based on the “cartographic stratigraphy” and historical cartography of Singapore, provides valuable elements to assess the specificity and unicity of the toponymic Sequent Occupance of the Lion City.
6. Pre-Colonial Toponyms
Very few places in Singapore exhibit a linear history of Sequent Occupance from before colonial times. As will be discussed in later sections of this article, the majority of the Singaporean toponyms currently in use appeared soon after the British settled on the island and the need to name existing places and new streets and parts of town became compelling and urgent. It is not always clear where most of the names in the early maps came from. That is, were these names already being used by the local inhabitants or did the surveyors name them as needed?
In this section, we will discuss six toponyms that were present on the island before colonial times and we will outline their history up to modern day. Note that there are a number of islands whose names also appear on pre-colonial maps (for example,
Pedra Branca and
Sentosa—known in very early days as
Pulau Blakang Mati), but, due to time constraints, we will not discuss them in this article. The first toponym is
Fort Canning Hill, which is perhaps the oldest recorded settlement in Singapore’s history. The other five toponyms are found in the 1604 and 1615 maps by the Malay-Portuguese cartographer Manuel Godinho de Erédia [
13,
14] (p. 374). On these maps are clearly marked the following names:
Name on Erédia’s Maps (1604, 1615) | Current Names |
1. sunebodo | Sungei Bedok (Bedok River) |
2. tanamera | Tanah Merah |
3. tanion ru | Tanjong Rhu |
4. tanion rusa/ruça | Changi |
5. batu quina | Batu Berlayar |
6.1. Fort Canning Hill
Fort Canning Hill is a 156-foot high hill located at the junction of Canning Rise and Fort Canning Road, Singapore. It is not indicated on Erédia’s maps.
One of the earliest attestations of the existence of a settlement on
Fort Canning Hill dates to around 1330, when Wang Dayuan [
25] reported that, when he visited the island in the 1300s, he found two settlements on
Dānmǎxī (Temasek). He recorded their names as
Long Ya Men “Dragon’s Tooth Strait” and
Ban Zu. Miksic [
10] (p. 177) posits that
Ban Zu could be a transliteration of the Malay word
pancur, meaning “a spring or stream”. Miksic explains that
Pancur in Malay is a common place name in coastal Sumatra, Malaysia, and Riau. The name was given to places with clean drinking water, so that sailors could more easily find fresh water when travelling through the region. Wang recounted that
Ban Zu was located on a hill, in what is thought to be today’s
Fort Canning Hill, behind
Long Ya Men [
10] (pp. 177–183).
According to the
Hikayat Abdullah (Ḥikāyat ʿAbdullāh), an autobiography of Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir (ʿAbdullāh bin ʿAbdul Qādir), better known as Munshi Abdullah (Munši’ [Munšī, Munśī] ʿAbdullāh), who was a Malay writer-interpreter hired by Raffles as his secretary and a Malay teacher, written between 1840 and 1843 and published in 1849, the
Temenggong, the local Malay Chief, told Colonel Farquhar (the first British Resident and Commandant of colonial Singapore from 1819 to 1823, who accompanied Sir Stamford Raffles on his very first voyage to the island of Singapura in 1819) in 1819 on his visit to
Singapura, that a spring of water flowed from the west side of the hill ([
26], p. 127; [
10], p. 180). The stream was known as
pancur larangan, “the forbidden spring”. It was thought that the stream was a bathing place for the women of the past ruler who had built a palace on the hill. Because of this and the fact it was the site where a palace had supposedly been built in ancient times and no common men were allowed to ascend it, that it was known by the Malays as
Bukit Larangan, “Forbidden Hill” [
26] (p. 127). In 1821 John Crawfurd, the second British resident of Singapore, reports seeing the remains of what was reportedly a tomb of a past “ruler” [
27]. In 1819, the British built an aqueduct from the stream to supply drinking water to ships visiting Singapore. However, the spring dried up when wells were dug to try and increase the supply of water [
10].
Raffles had returned to his position as Lieutenant-Governor in
Bencoolen (now
Bengkulu City) in Sumatra in 1819, soon after signing the treaty with Tengku Abdul Rahman, the local official or
temenggong, who controlled Singapore on behalf of the Sultanate of Riau, to allow the British to establish a settlement in Singapore. In 1822, a small residence was built on the hill for Raffles to live in when he returned to Singapore. The British flag was also raised on the hill on a flagpole at this time, and the hill became known as the
Singapore Hill. Raffles’ house was extended and restructured by the architect George Dromgold Coleman in 1824 and used as the Government House, thus the hill acquired the name
Government Hill. At this time, the place was known by the Chinese in Singapore by its Hokkien name,
Ong Ke Swa “Government Hill” [
20]. During this period, the Malays began referring to it as
Bukit Bendera, “Flag Hill”. Later, the hill became known by the Malays as
Bukit Tuan Bonham, “Sir Bonham’s Hill” after Sir Samuel George Bonham, who was the Governor in Singapore from 1836 to 1848 [
28].
The increasing importance of the port and the lack of harbour defences led to the final name change of the hill. The Government House was demolished in 1859, and a military fort was built on the hill. Construction of the fort was completed in 1861, and the building was named
Fort Canning, after Viscount Charles John Canning, who was, at that time, the Governor-General and the first Viceroy of India [
9]. The hill was thus renamed
Fort Canning Hill.
The history of Fort Canning Hill shows its origin as a Malay settlement, transitioning to a colonial outpost and, finally, to its current standing in modern Singapore. Along the way, it has had many different names and its original name did not survive.
6.2. Sunebodo—Sungei Bedok
The earliest mention of
Bedok is a hydronym
sunebodo in Eredia’s 1604 and 1615 maps [
13,
14,
29].
Sunebodo is the altered form of the Malay
Sungei Bedok “Bedok River” [
10]. It appears also in Franklin and Jackson’s 1828 map of Singapore, labelled
Badok S. (
Sungei Badok “River Bedok”) [
30]. The river still exists today, although now it is a canal,
Bedok Canal, and it leads to the
Bedok Reservoir.
There are two theories for the origins of the name
Bedok. Savage and Yeoh [
9] (p. 77) propose that one origin might be from the name of a Malay drum, the
bedoh. These drums, before loudspeakers, were used to signal the time of prayer by members of the mosque or to sound alarms. The “h” sound is pronounced as a glottal stop, written orthographically in Malay as “k”, hence
bedoh became
bedok. The other possibility is from the word
biduk, which refers to small fishing boats that used to be very common along the Singaporean coastline.
Originally only a hydronym,
Bedok, after a period of British Colonization, came to represent a larger area. In a survey map dated 1873 by Wahid Khan,
Bedok (spelled here
Buddoh) is noted to include a large part east of
Sungei Bedok (see section on
Tanah Merah below). Currently, instead, the river forms the eastern-most boundary of the Bedok planning area. It is a residential neighbourhood with the largest number of residents in the country [
31] (pp. 12, 65).
6.3. Tanamera—Tanah Merah
Tanah Merah is a geographic area located in the south-eastern coast of Singapore. Its boundary is not clearly defined, but it is agreed upon to be the area east of
Bedok (with some overlap) and south-west of
Changi. It was originally part of the coastline, but, after the “Great Reclamation” in 1971 [
32], the original coast moved “inland” (see section on
Tanjong Rusa/Ruça (Changi)).
As mentioned above, the earliest attestation of
Tanah Merah is in Eredia’s 1604 map, written as
Tanamera. The name can also be seen in Eredia’s map of 1615. The geographical area depicted in this map is between
Tanjung Rusa (see next section) and
Sunebodo (see previous section), and corresponds to present day
Tanah Merah, although the exact location is difficult to pinpoint due to land reclamation and the ever-expanding area around
Changi.
Tanah Merah literally means “red land” and it was commonly translated as “Red Cliffs”. It was named such by the local people (i.e., the
orang laut ‘sea people’) because of the red laterite hills located on this tract of the coast. The laterites gave the cliffs a reddish colour that was easily seen from the sea, and thus the hills became important navigational landmarks for the
orang laut [
9] (p. 839).
During precolonial times, other European maps, although not specifically naming this area, provided descriptions of its geography, due to its significance in navigation. For example, in a map by the Portuguese Cartographer André Pereira dos Reis dated 1654, the area was labelled
Bareiras Vermelhas “red barriers”. Following that, in 1806, a British hydrographic chart, even though it does not name
Tanah Merah, depicts hills in the spot where the larger red hill was [
33]. British maps marked out the cliffs by their colour, see “Red Cliffs” [
34,
35] or “Remarkable Red Patch” [
36].
During the period of British colonization, maps began identifying two cliffs. A map of Singapore by William Farquhar dated 1822 labels two hills as
1st Red Cliff and
2nd Red Cliff [
37,
38].
1st Red Cliff seems to be where the present-day
Bedok (as mentioned above) is situated, and
2nd Red Cliff is where today’s
Tanah Merah is located, but also overlaps with some areas of present-day
Changi. Then, in the 1828 map by Franklin and Jackson, the cliffs are marked as
Small Red Cliff and
Large Red Cliff, respectively [
30]. In Thomson’s 1842 map, we see both the English names and their Malay translations,
Tanah Merah Keechee “Small Red Cliffs” and
Tanah Merah Besar “Large Red Cliffs” [
39]. An early Chinese name for
Tanah Merah was “
chi-wo kong” (zhì-hé gǎng) 致和港 [
40], which means something akin to “to peace/heavenly harbour”. Probably referring to a safe harbour or a landmark that meant the sailors had reached the port.
Tanah Merah, in both precolonial and colonial times, was seen as not only a navigational landmark, but also an area suitable for military defence. The armada of the Sultan of Johor and a Dutch fleet were stationed near the location and battled the Portuguese who had blockaded the Strait of Johor in 1603 [
41]. The Flemish trader Jacques de Coutre, around 1620, proposed that a fort be built “on the east end of the
Ysla de la Sabandaria Vieja”, which, as mentioned above, was a name for Singapore [
10] (p. 408), and Borschberg [
42] (p. 116) believes “the east end” is present-day
Bedok or
Tanah Merah. Prior to World War II, three coastal defence guns were installed at
Tanah Merah [
43] (pp. 161, 168).
The reclamation works beginning in the 1960s levelled both the hills/cliffs. The area known as Tanah Merah Kechil became incorporated into Bedok, and Tanah Merah Besar is now simply Tanah Merah. Traces of the besar and kechil can still be seen in road names in Bedok, with names like Tanah Merah Besar Road, Tanah Merah Kechil Link, Tanah Merah Kechil Avenue.
6.4. Tanion ru—Tanjong Rhu
Tanjong Rhu is a commercial and residential area located in central Singapore, and within the Kallang region. Tanjong Rhu houses Singapore’s Sports Hub, which includes numerous sports facilities, including the National Stadium and the Singapore Indoor Stadium.
In Eredia’s 1604 map,
Tanjong Rhu was written
Tanion Rû. Ru comes from the tree grown in the area
—casuarina littoria, and locally known to the Malays as
pokok rhu [
9] (p. 848).
Tanjong Rhu means literally, “the cape of the rhu trees”. The original location was a sandy spit jutting into the
Kallang Basin.
The above-mentioned 1604 map might be the only map documenting
Tanjong Rhu in its pre-colonial stages. During the colonial period, the area is frequently labelled as
Sandy Point [
44]. The Malay name resurfaced alongside the English name in some maps, for example,
Tanjong Droo in 1825 [
45] and
Tanjong Roo in 1842 [
39]. The late 1800s and early 1900s saw the point referred to as
Tanjong Ru [
46,
47]. The place is also known as
Sha tsui to the Chinese, which in Cantonese means “sand pit” [
9] (p. 848).
Raffles intended the place to be a marine yard, as evident from Farquhar’s letter to Captain Flint in 1822 [
48], who went on to start a boat building and repair business (Savage & Yeoh, 2003), and the area was also known as
marine yard [
49]. The location soon became a centre for ship-building and a number of shipyards operated from there until the 1980s. After the final phase of the East Coast Reclamation project along the south and eastern coastline in 1977, the old sandy outcrop was completely covered and extended southwards to include what is currently
Marina East [
32].
6.5. Tanjong Rusa/Ruça (Changi)
Changi is Singapore’s largest planning area, located in the easternmost part of the island. It is the current location of both Changi Airport and Changi Air Base.
A water colour drawing in
História de serviços com martírio de Luís Monteiro Coutinho [
29] (p. 49), depicting a maritime battle between Portuguese and Achenese in 1577, labels the
Changi we know today as
Tanjon Rusa (see [
50], p. 122). It appeared as
Tanjon Rusa in 1604 on a map by the Malay-Portuguese cartographer Manuel Godinho de Erédia [
13]. Several years later, it appeared as
Tanion Ruça in a (reconstructed) map dated 1615 attributed to Erédia [
14] (p. 374).
It is not clear what the term
Rusa refers to.
Rusa is Malay for “deer”, with
Tanjong Rusa meaning “cape of the deer”. It might be referring to the Sambar Deer (
Rusa unicolor) or the Barking Deer (
Muntiacus muntjak), which once roamed the forests of Singapore, but have now decreased significantly due to deforestation and hunting [
51]. The term might refer instead to the mousedeer, which resemble the deer, but are not, in fact, “true” deer. Singapore is the home to the lesser mousedeer (
Tragulus kanchil) and the greater mousedeer (
Tragulus napu) [
52]. They are also important characters in Malay folklore, often portrayed as crafty and intelligent animals [
53]. However, typically, mousedeer are referred to as
kanchil in Malay [
53], not as
rusa. It might be that
rusa is only used when referring to the “true” deer. Mills [
54] (p. 225) posits that
Rusa might be a variant of the Malay word
Kusah. He notes that the shoals off this section of the island’s coast were known as
Beting Kusah.
Beting is Malay for a “shoal or submerged sand bank” and
Kusah could be a mispronunciation of
susah [
55], which means “difficult” or “hard”. Another possible meaning is “the dangerous sand-bank” [
55] (p. 76). Indeed, there are references to a
Beting Kusah, Beting Kusu and a
Kampung Beting Kusa in the
Changi area [
56]. Stubbs [
57] states that these places were covered up by the land reclamation projects (1975–2004) that now form
Changi Airport. The
kampong was cleared out in 1948 to allow a Royal Air Force expansion of the Changi airstrip [
58].
The etymology of
Changi is disputed, but the generally accepted view is that the name was derived from a botanical “lexical item”. The botanical namesakes include the locally grown climbing shrub
changi ular (
Apama corymbosa), the tall
dhengai (Balanscarpus heimii) trees that surround the area in the early 1800s, local timber
chengai that were used for buildings and furniture, and the
Hopea Sangal tree, which was also known as the
Chengal Pasir or
Chengal Mata Kuching (
Hopea odorata), that also grew in the area once [
9]. The first mention seems to be as
Tajong Changee in Farquhar’s 1822 Survey Map [
37], with the north-eastern protruding tip of the area (around today’s
Nicoll Drive and
Changi Coast Road) as
Franklin Point, named after the surveyor Captain Franklin [
9]. Later, in a map by Congalton and Thomson dated 1846 [
59],
Franklin Point is labelled as
Tanjong Changee, and
Tajong Changee as simply
Changee. In a map by J.T. Thomson from 1842 [
39],
Franklin Point and
Tanjong Changee are referred to as
Point Franklin and
Tanjong Changi and point to the same place. This is also seen in the 1835 map of Singapore by Heinrich Carl Wilhelm Berghaus [
60].
It is worth noting that, in the above mentioned maritime map of 1577 [
29] (p. 49), a small island north of
Tanjong Rusa was labelled
Chani. This island seems to be what is currently known as
Tekong Island. Also, in the previously mentioned map of 1615 by Erédia, the group of islands between
Singapore and
Johor,
Pulau Tekong Besar, Pulau Tekong Kechil, Pulau Ubin, etc., is labelled as
Pula Chagni [
15] (p. 374).
Chagni and
Chani seem to be phonetically similar to “changi” or variations of it. It is possible the name
changi existed before the 1800s, and it referred to the island of
Tekong instead. For unknown reasons, the name “migrated” south to the easternmost tip of
Singapore,
Tanjong Rusa, with this name replaced by
Changee and, then,
Changi.
6.6. Batu Quina
This is an interesting toponym, as the name shows a possible combination of two languages.
Batu means “rock” in Malay, and
Quina seems to be Portuguese for “corner”. Therefore, the name could be translated as “corner stone”. Borschberg [
14] believes
Batu Quina to be the stone formation, or promontory [
9], known as
Batu Berlayer, that used to be at the western end of the
New Harbour. The name appears in literature and in maps in two forms:
Berlayer and
Berlayar. The agreed origin seems to be
Batu Berlayar “sail rock” [
9,
10]. The name comes from the shape of the outcrop that was said to resemble a sail [
9,
10]. The name
Sail Rock can be seen on an 1827 map by Captain Rofs of the
Singapore harbour [
61].
The name
Batu Berlayer can be seen in a number of earlier maps of the area, for example in Berghaus’s 1835 map [
60]. Other names for this outcrop are
Batoo Blyer [
45]. Farquhar had noted it down as
Batoo Bulaya in 1822 [
37] and Franklin and Jackson noted it down as
Batu Balayan in 1828 [
30]. Thomson’s 1842 map shows this as
Sinki Point or
Batoo Beylayer [
39]. In his 1846 map, he has it as
Batu Berlayer and
Lots Wife. As early as 1709, British travellers had named this rocky pinnacle as “Lott’s wife” [
10] (pp. 145, 176). While in Thomson’s map with Samuel Congalton from the same year, he reports the cape as
Sinki Point and the rock as both
Lots Wife or
Batu Berlayer [
59]. Here he also has a small river nearby called
Sungei Batu Berlayer, which seems to be the current
Berlayer Creek. A 1907 map shows this point both as
Berlayer Point and
Lots Wife [
62] and, in the 1914 map by Wagner and Debes, it appears as
Tanjong Blayer and
Lot’s Wife [
46]. The rocky formation was blown up by the British in 1848 to improve the passage of ships through the harbour [
9].
The name of this rock formation has been connected with the account (see section on
Fort Canning Hill) by the Chinese traveller Wang Dayuan, who sailed through the area and noted down
Long Ya Men (
Lóng Yá Mén) “Dragon’s Tooth Strait” or “Dragon’s Tooth Gate” as one of two settlements on the island [
7,
9,
10,
25].
The name
Berlayer was given to a road,
Bukit Berlayer Road (this road now does not exist anymore) and to two villages,
Kampong Berlayer and
Batu Berlayer Village, in 1922 [
9] (p. 113). The area has undergone a number of redevelopments with the road, the
kampong and the village being closed.
Berlayer is used for the aforementioned
Berlayer Creek, while
Berlayar is utilised for the
Berlayar Beacon, a naval beacon built in the 1930s, and for the
Berlayar Canal. All these locations, very near to each other, are in the same
Labrador Park area.
8. Conclusions
This paper aimed to investigate the applicability of the notion of Sequent Occupance to the Singapore context through the study of Singapore Toponomastics. The analysis, carried out on ten local toponyms, does give us an insight into the diachronic and synchronic development of Singapore urban Toponymy. What the results of this work show us is that the influences of all the cultures which have “sequentially” occupied Singapore from the past to the present can be seen in the history of its place names. Some places underwent numerous changes in their names before settling to what we see today. None of the pre-colonial toponyms were resilient to the socio-political forces at play and remained as originally named. Singapore’s multilingual and multicultural nature is played out in many different ways. However, it is inevitable that, since the city was planned and built during colonial times, its naming practices seem to be firmly linked to its colonial past. The place names in Singapore reflect a willingness by the colonial masters at first, and the new independent government later, to accommodate this diversity in the toponyms and odonyms of this now very international city.
The cultural imprint of each group that lived or passed through Singapore is, indeed, never completely lost, and its traces in toponyms can be seen to the present day. However, as mentioned above, the study of the place names of the Lion City has to be conducted always taking into account the different chronologies and timelines of the related individual naming processes, in order to reconstruct and provide a stratigraphy of names highlighting the different roots and origins of the place names currently constituting the whole existing set of Singapore’s toponyms. The synchronic, actual “big picture” of the contemporary local place names in the Lion City, definitely showing the Sequent Occupance of these denominations, finds in the historical study of their roots and diachronic development its comprehensive explanation and, at the same time, shows its nature of an etymological puzzle and a series of onomastic gaps that still need to be filled.
The article highlights, therefore, through the analysis of local place names, the historical processes in the “making” of the multi-layered Singapore society, from pre-colonial times to the contemporary Lion City. Our analysis shows how the current landscape of local toponyms, alongside its architectural landscape, is interpretable through Sequent Occupance principles, in an urban environment where synchronic elements have to be studied both in their current, contemporary context and through the reconstruction of their historical origins. In all, our study provides an effective and reliable analysis of the complex historical and cultural processes at play in the old and new Singapore.