A brief on my trip to Bali and Singapore in September 2005

I spent some time on google yesterday looking for old photos of Raffles, but all I could find were photos of Old Raffles... and finally one site with old postcards, one with a tiny picture, that I couldn't enlarge, of the old hotel and its surroundings in days gone by.

Written accounts of the early history of Singapore are sketchy and the names used to refer to the country are varied. In the third century, a Chinese account gave reference to Singapore as Pu-luo-chung, or "island at the end of a peninsula". In 1320, however, the Mongol court sent a mission to a place called Long Yamen (Dragon's Tooth Strait) to get elephants. This probably referred to Keppel Harbour. A visitor from China, Wang Dayuan, who came around 1330, called the main settlement Pancur (spring), and reported that there were Chinese already living here. One of the earliest references to Singapore as Temasek, or Sea Town, was found in the Javanese Nagarakretagama' of 1365. The name was also mentioned in a Vietnamese source at around the same time