The Lost Gold Coins of the Old Singapore Library

[Music playing]

Jimmy
Hi, everyone. I’m Jimmy Yap, and I’m Chief Editor of BiblioAsia, a publication of the National Library of Singapore. In today’s episode, we’re going to dive into the mystery of two ancient gold coins that were discovered in Singapore in the middle of the 19th century, and that later went missing. With me today is Foo Shu Tieng, a librarian of the National Library, who is also an archaeologist. She’s written about these coins in BiblioAsia. And she’s going to help us to get to the bottom of this mystery. Welcome back to BiblioAsio+, Shu. How are you?

Shu
Good. How are you?

Jimmy
I’ve been very good, although it’s been a hot day.

Shu
[Laughs]

Jimmy
Can you start off by telling us more about these coins? When and where would they be found?

Shu
Okay, so picture this in the early parts of Singapore’s history: it was actually a penal colony. And so around 1840, they were trying to build a road to the New Harbour, which is now Keppel Harbour. And so these convicts, when they were actually building the road, they discovered some coins. So it’s possible that the coins might have been part of a settlement or it’s possible that they might have been part of a graveyard. We don’t know. There was a map that I found that’s now with NUS [National University of Singapore]. I think it’s part of the Singapore Land Authority collection that actually depicts the area in the 1840s. And so we think that’s the best shot.

Unfortunately, there’s just a few houses depicted on the map, and so we’re not quite sure what happened back then. The land belonged to the sultan or actually the Temenggong Daeng Ibrahim. basically the Temenggong actually purchased them from the convicts. And eventually in 1849, when the Singapore Library was set up and all that, he actually donated them.

And so the Straits Settlements Governor, Butterworth, actually presented them on behalf of the Temenggong. And so the Singapore Library had it on display in the reading room, just like you’ll see some of the paintings displayed in our reading room today. And so, in 1870, in the ‘60s and ‘70s, the Singapore Library then went into, let’s say, financial difficulties. It was because of a few factors. There were things like the majority of readership actually being the military. And so when they actually had to leave Singapore, much of the readership actually pulled out. And so that initial base was actually no longer there. And so when they fell into financial difficulties, that’s when they had to move libraries.

So I think this is the most likely time when it went missing. Maybe there was an administrative transfer somewhere else. And so I was trying to figure out, okay, if the coins were discovered during this period, where could they have gone? And so I looked through other important early coins to figure out: okay, this coin went here, this coin was there. And so from there, possibly people can try and see whether or not they can trace back to that discovery. But this is not just the only possibility. There could be other times when the coins went missing.

Jimmy
So Shu Tieng, that’s very interesting. But do we know that the coins weren’t stolen rather than transferred out?

Shu
Actually, we don’t. There’s a couple of possibilities. One was that after the fall of Singapore in September 1942, I found a Singapore library report mentioning that someone had actually broken a glass exhibition case and that ten ancient gold coins were taken from the Raffles Museum itself. So the Raffles Library and Museum actually inherited the Singapore library materials. So if the coins were still at the museum, this is the next possibility, right? But the reason why I think it might have must have happened before is that when I was looking through the exhibition lists of items at the Raffles Museum, I wasn’t able to find the coins.

So this is why I think they might have been transferred earlier. So I use an Occam’s Razor kind of thing – that sometimes the simplest explanation is probably… I mean, it’s not very sexy. You know, there were other break-ins, and so it might have been one of the break-ins at the Raffles Museum in the 1890s, for example. When they wrote One Hundred Years of Singapore, all they have is basically the transliteration of the coins. So that’s what I think happened.

Jimmy
This is theft of artefacts. Is that like a relatively common thing in the museum world?

Shu
Actually, yes. It’s actually a fairly common thing. I don’t know if you’ve read the newspaper articles recently, but I think in August [2023], the British Museum alone mentioned more than 1300 artefacts stolen recently. It’s fairly common, often surprisingly related to the either crime syndicates, or sometimes terrorist funding. So these are, you know, issues that plague us all. But if you want to know a good book about this particular issue, there’s a book called Returning Southeast Asia’s Past: Objects Museums and Restitution.

Jimmy
So what is the significance of these coins? What does it tell us about Singapore’s history?

Shu
So I think this might surprise you about ancient Singapore: the majority of the coins that we find in archaeological excavations from, let’s say, the 14th century are mostly Northern Song. So these are coins from the Northern Song Dynasty. They date from, I guess 11th to, I would say like the 12th century. The majority are from there because they’re considered expired coins. So when China and Southeast Asia came to trade, they would use this as sort of like the worth in metal value, right? And so in Southeast Asia, there was a booming trade in East Java. For example, the Majapahit actually used these coins to pay for fines officially and things like that.

And so Singapore was probably using these coins for long distance trade, that kind of thing. But we’re not sure. There’s a lot of evidence to indicate that Singapore at the time was in contact with a lot of different traders along the Malay Peninsula and also in Sumatra. And so the significance of these two coins in particular is that they’re actually Islamic. They depict a very different period from the 17th century, which we thought that was maybe, you know, this 14th century period, which is the Temasek period. And then later on, there was a fishing village in 1890. That’s like the general Singapore history, right? Over time in the past couple of decades, historians have actually started to uncover more historical documents that say that in the 17th, 18th century, actually, there was something else in Singapore.

So these coins actually show that there was something happening here, especially at Telok Blangah, what there was and to what extent. A scholar by the name of Dr. Peter Borschberg at the National University of Singapore found a particular, I think it’s like archival material, about a Flemish gem trader by the name of Jacque de Couture. And he mentioned that in Sentosa there was Orang Laut and trade. So there was a harbourmaster in the area. So I suspect that this coin might be related to that. And so maybe these coins were used for regional trade.

Jimmy
It shows that there was economic activity in the 17th century in Singapore, right? And it might have something to do with trade with Aceh as well.

Shu
That’s right.

Jimmy
So Shu Tieng, you decided to do something interesting with these coins, because actually there are no photos of these coins. We don’t know really what they look like, but we do have the texts. We do know what was written on the coins. They were written in Jawi, and they were then transliterated, but you decided it just wasn’t good enough. What made you decide to relook the transcriptions on these coins?

Shu
When I was looking at the original 1849 Singapore Library report, I realised that the transliteration was wrong. I was comparing them to more modern research about the coins, and I was looking at the coins and they didn’t make sense. So I suspected that it might have been wrong. And so I think it might have been an issue with like thinking that there are similar words. It’s like having in Chinese, for example, just one stroke or a couple of strokes wrong could be something completely different, right? And so I thought this could have also happened with the coins because it’s in Arabic script. The coins might not have been very good copies. They might have been worn. And so I asked a couple of my colleagues to actually help me try to figure this out.

So basically what I did was I brought over the books that had the Arabic versions of the names of kings in Aceh. And then I asked them to transliterate the English versions back into Jawi. And then I compared these to see whether or not there were similar names or similar symbols. And since the two coins had something in common, the sort of backside of the coin. So I suspected that they might have been from the same king or similar dynasty or something like that. So that’s where we started our journey. And from there we propose a theory. Of course, researchers can always chime in with other theories, but we really think that this is probably one of the most…

Jimmy
Plausible.

Shu
Plausible explanation, basically.

Jimmy
Yeah. Okay. Have you heard back from anyone? I mean, you must, having done the transliteration of these coins into and gotten a new sort of translation. For example, did John Miksic say anything?

Shu
Unfortunately, John Miksic is not versed in Jawi. So somebody who is actually versed in Jawi would be able to do further research. So there has been great interest [especially from] people from Malaysia, because I think in Malaysia, Jawi is actually a potential course that you can learn during your schooling days. So anybody can sort of try and see what it means on their own. And so that could be something else we can look forward to in the next 5 to 10 years, hopefully.

Jimmy
So has anyone been in touch with you about your article?

Shu
Dr. William Gibson. He was studying about keramat in Telok Blangah. He contacted me recently because the coins are obviously found in Telok Blangah area. And so he was looking at keramat in the area. And so he saw that, hey, this is something interesting. So yeah, so we compared notes, and he does think that the first coin is correct. The second coin is still up for grabs. But I think we have one of the plausible answers, if not the plausible answer.

Jimmy
Okay, that’s great. We have the Malay coins and mainly Northern Song coins. Anything else?

Shu
Primarily Northern Song coins. But the earliest coins that we found actually date from the Tang Dynasty. With the discovery of the shipwreck artefacts, it’s possible that there are more. So I haven’t looked at all the materials yet, but from the ones that I’ve seen from the land-based sites, they’re mostly from the Northern Song period. But Tang Dynasty ones, I mean, they could have been heirloom objects, that kind of thing. So it’s difficult to say.

Jimmy
Thank you very much, Shu Tieng, for that very interesting overview of the mysterious coins that were found in Singapore. For more information about these amazing coins and how Shu Tieng sort of reverse engineered the whole transliteration process, please read the article in BiblioAsia. But we’ve now come to that part of the interview where we do quickfire questions. So Shu Tieng, tell me a common misconception about archaeology that really annoys you.

Shu
The most often annoying question is they think archaeology is about finding dinosaurs.

Jimmy
Oh, really?

Shu
Yeah. So just to be clear, it’s palaeontology if you’re interested in dinosaurs; if you’re interested in archaeology, it’s about humans. So just to make that clear, they're a few million years apart.

Jimmy
So yeah, okay. It’s archaeological, not paleontological. What’s an archaeological mystery that you would like to solve besides this, all these gold coins?

Shu
Okay, so other than coins, another ancient trading item was cowrie shells. So it basically performs the same function as the coins, but it’s a little harder to study because obviously there are fewer written records about it. But they use these cowrie shells during the slave trade, and they use them all up to like the mid-19th century. And so in Singapore there’re some remnants of it. You can see they are often mentioned, cowrie shells, in trading reports. But to what extent and how big the trade was, that’s a question to be answered. So that’s something that I’d be interested in studying. Yeah.

Jimmy
What is the cowrie shell? I mean, is it a seashell?

Shu
It’s a seashell, yes.

Jimmy
Does it look like a snail?

Shu
It’s about the size of your thumb, if you look down at it. People have started using the shells as sort of money probably since the 8th century onwards. And so we suspect it goes back even further. But the historical evidence is a bit rare. So they go all the way from Africa, all the way to Thailand, Vietnam, even some parts of Southern China. And so there was this cowrie trade that was going back and forth. The Dong Son drums you can see in the museums in Southeast Asia – those actually were full of cowry shells in southern China.

In Southeast Asia, for example, the Dong Son drums are there, but without cowrie shells. We don’t know why. So there’s some weird thing going on, right? For example, in Sukhothai, they were using these cowry shells often for small change. And so this extended all the way south to the Kedah area. But whether they extend it all the way south to Johor or even Singapore, that’s another question.

Jimmy
What is your favourite archaeological movie or archaeological pop culture moment?

Shu
The Tomb Raider game that was rebooted. I think it was maybe 2013. So maybe it’s an older game. But I saw there was a Southeast Asian plot inside as one of the artefacts there. I was like, “Oh, yes, they thought of us.” Ban Chang pottery. This is the moment for us to shine, that kind of thing. So that was my favourite moment, but I’m not sure if others would feel the same.

Jimmy
Complete the sentence: Archaeology is....

Shu
Archaeology is life.

Jimmy
What does that mean?

Shu
It’s knowing that the past is discoverable, and so it gives you life’s mission. And so the library also is sort of gives you a mission where you think that the past is discoverable, right? So we’re all working in concert, basically.

Jimmy
And what are you working on now?

Shu
You’ll be surprised, but it’s nothing to do with archaeology. I’m working on a couple of encyclopedia articles on the paramedic and ambulance.

Jimmy
Okay. I’m not sure this will make it to the final cut.

Shu
Okay, but that’s what I’m working on. Honestly.

Jimmy
Okay. Shu Tieng, thanks for joining us on BiblioAsia+ today. To learn more about these mysterious gold coins, check out Shu Tieng’s article on the BiblioAsia website. Thanks, Shu Tieng.

Shu
Thank you, Jimmy.

Jimmy
If you’ve enjoyed this episode, subscribe to the podcast and the BiblioAsia newsletter. Thank you for joining me on BiblioAsia+.

Resources

Foo Shu Tieng, "Revisiting the Mystery of the Missing Gold Coins," BiblioAsia 19, no. 3 (2023).

Louise Tythacott and Panggah Ardiyansyah, eds., Returning Southeast Asia's Past: Objects, Museums, and Restitution (Singapore: NUS Press, 2021)

This episode of BiblioAsia Podcast was hosted by Jimmy Yap. Sound engineering was done by One Dash. The background music "Di Tanjong Katong" was composed by Ahmad Patek and performed by Chords Haven. Special thanks to Shu for coming on the show.

The BiblioAsia Podcast by the National Library Singapore tells stories about Singapore history.