Thomas Stamford Raffles

No one should have to say they're sad.

Reverend Flint's gift of his uncle's Dutch East Indian artifacts to the British Museum means that two of Sir Stamford Raffles' wayang masks, collected during his time as governor of Java, sit behind a glass case in the Enlightenment Gallery.

He lives on in them or through them.

For counterpoint, they have been placed beside two mummified heads, one of which retains the bandaging that has corroded from the other.

Let's explore how this linguistic mashup has shaped identity, policy, and even digital culture in Singapore.

Singapore is a living laboratory for contact linguistics, where English has been the lingua franca since Stamford Raffles set up a trading post in eighteen nineteen.

The island's population today speaks Malay, Mandarin, Tamil, and dozens of Chinese dialects like Hokkien and Teochew, alongside English that everyone uses at work or school.

Because so many tongues collide in such a small area, the language community has developed a rich tapestry of borrowing, code-switching, and most famously, a colloquial register called Singlish.

Okay.

So the sun bear's formal scientific description came in 1821, and is Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, a British colonial administrator best known for founding modern Singapore today.

Hmm.

And he was out there, um...

So basically he thought at least that they were leaving because of conscription and taxes, you know, hallmarks of civilization.

And then there are also later colonialists like Sir Stamford Raffles, who despite his name was not a clown, he was the founder of British Singapore.

Here's what he said about colonial rule in Indonesia.

Here I am the advocate of despotism.

We've seen that they have buildings inside, and then they tell us this.

Now, like we said, 1814, our timeline, Sir Thomas Raffles was informed of a large hill in the middle of the jungle.

and they needed to clear the volcanic debris to find this temple where the locals all just thought it was a hill.

Like we have said so many freaking times, the real palaces are under our feet.

Model in the Raffael- Rafflesian...

Well, he was a great admirer of Sir Stamford Raffles, of the Rafflesian image or vision of the whole East Indies, which means insular Southeast Asia, to be open to free trade, where the British or the English were very partial to it, uh, free trade.

But because Pengiran Hashim was, and his brother, Buru- uh, Baduruddin, was, uh, assassinated in a, uh, political faction in the palace, some kind of palace struggle, he put all his dreams to Sarawak, making, trying to make Sarawak a model state, in a sense, in his conception of a model state.

A model state in the concept of Sir James Brooke is to take care of the interests and welfare of the indigenous people.

The British already had a settlement at Penang in the northern part of the Malay Peninsula, but they wanted another port further south.

In 1819, a British official named Stamford Raffles arrived in Singapore.

Raffles was working for the British East India Company.

The East India Company was a powerful organization.