History
In pre-colonial times, the original inhabitants of Singapore, the aboriginal biduanda orang kallang, lived in the swamps at the mouth of the Kallang River, and fished from their boats, seldom venturing out into the open sea. At the time when Sir Stamford Raffles landed in Singapore in 1819, half of the population of 1,000 were orang kallang.
Kallang River is the place, too, where in the early days the Bugis traders from Sulawesi (Celebes) unloaded their cargoes of spices and tortoise shells, gold dust and slaves from their palari or their leteh-leteh. These sailing boats were a common sight off the sea front even up to the 1960s.
Today, this long, winding river has little or no industry except for a short distance, although a new industrial estate at Kallang Basin, near Kallang Bahru, has been built.
Read more about this topic: Kallang River
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of our era is the nauseating and repulsive history of the crucifixion of the procreative body for the glorification of the spirit.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“In front of these sinister facts, the first lesson of history is the good of evil. Good is a good doctor, but Bad is sometimes a better.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)