160 NOTES ON MALAY HISTORY. 



marked on the coastline bears the characters 



(also unexplained: perhaps they represent Takua headland, 

 if there is one?) and then, after passing two rivers and several 

 unnamed islands, we reach Tenasserim, which lies outside my 

 present sphere of interest. 



V. Prehistoric Speculations and Conjectures. 



The evidence here put together gives, T think, an outline 

 picture of what the Malay Peninsula was in the second half of 

 the 14th. century, which though very sketchy is not altogether 

 without interest to us moderns. One would like to peer 

 further back into the dim past of this region and form some 

 sort of idea as to when the process of Malay colonisation began. 

 But unfortunately there is very little evidence to help us. Mr. 

 Wilkinson hypothetically gives Singapore a very short lease of 

 life, (from 1360 (?) to 1377 A. D., he suggests). ' That however 

 is quite impossible : to have made the impression that it did 

 on Malay legend and tradition, it must have lasted much 

 longer and I see no reason why it should not have flourished 

 during the reigns of five generations of kings, as the Sejarah 

 Melayu asserts. That would give it an existence of about a 

 century as a Malay settlement, say from about 1280 A. D. to 

 the time of its destruction about 1337 A. D. As a matter of 

 fact there is some evidence that a settlement had existed upon 

 this spot at an even earlier date: but we do not know that it 

 was a Malay one and it may have been a Mon-Khmer colony. 

 Crawfurd in his Descriptive Dictionary of the Indian Island, 

 p. 402, records that among the ruins of the old Singapore 

 (which amounted to very little when we acquired the place in 

 1819 A. D.) w 7 ere found some Chinese coins the oldest of which 

 bore the name of an emperor who died in 967 A. D. Unfor- 

 tunately he omits to tell us what the dates of the remaining 

 coins were and how many different specimens of Chinese coin- 

 age were represented in the find, although that information 

 would have been very much to the point. Of course it is not 

 safe to assume that there, was a settlement at Singapore as 



Jour, Straits Branch 



