Singapore's past just got a lot busier than the "sleepy fishing village" origin story suggests. A newly analyzed 14th-century shipwreck off its coast has yielded 3.9 tons of Chinese ceramics, offering the strongest maritime evidence yet that the island was a serious trading center centuries before the British arrived, per Phys.org. The so-called Temasek Wreck—named for Singapore's old moniker—carried an unusually rich haul, including nearly 300 pounds of rare blue-and-white porcelain, Longquan green-glazed celadon, Shufu porcelain, and hefty stoneware jars, according to research in the Journal of International Ceramic Studies. The study notes that the find is said to be "the first ancient shipwreck ever found in Singapore waters," per EurekAlert.
By tracking kiln origins and the decorative styles found on the ceramic pieces, lead researcher Michael Flecker dated the ship's final voyage to roughly sometime between 1340 and 1352, during China's Yuan dynasty, per Phys.org. A recurring design of mandarin ducks on a lotus pond, produced only briefly before unrest upended manufacturing, helped narrow down the window. Matching motifs between the wreck's smaller bowls and finds at Singapore sites such as Fort Canning, plus the absence of the oversize platters popular in India and the Middle East, led Flecker to conclude that the ship's main destination was Temasek itself. The cargo, he writes, sheds light on everything from everyday tableware to elite and ceremonial use in a thriving medieval port city.
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