Singapore

Singapore’s money was never its own. The fourteenth-century port of Temasek described by Wang Dayuan traded in cottons, iron and porcelain and left no prices. After 1819 the settlement ran on the Spanish and then Mexican silver dollar of 27.07 grams at 0.9028 fine, the coin that carried the China trade, while the East India Company kept its establishment lists in sicca rupees and reported to London in sterling, so a single account book can show three units at once. The archive is unusually good for so young a port: Company establishment returns and Straits Settlements records survive, the Singapore Chronicle and Singapore Free Press printed tenders, contracts and building costs from the 1820s, and congregations kept minute books of their own, hundreds of which C. B. Buckley quoted verbatim in 1902. That matters for a record of creative expenditure, because a town built almost entirely to order within thirty years left an itemised paper trail of who designed what, and for how much.

Gold weight and purity converter →

Making a film here? The Canada–Singapore corridor covers the treaty, the incentives, and where to start.

The Armenian Community of Singapore Pays for G. D. Coleman’s Church at Hill Street 1835–1836

The Armenian merchant families of Singapore — the Sarkies, Moses and Zechariah households among them — collected subscriptions from 1827, obtained a grant of ground at Hill Street in 1834, and commissioned George Drumgoole Coleman, the Irish architect who became the settlement’s Superintendent of Public Works, to design their church. The congregation’s own minute book, transcribed by C. B. Buckley, itemises the whole outlay at 5,058.30 Spanish dollars: 3,500 as the contract price to the building contractor, 400 to Coleman as architect and engineer, 708.36 for materials and 449.94 for vestments and ornaments — one of the few records in this collection that prices the design separately from the construction. The foundation was laid in January 1835 and the building consecrated in March 1836. The silver dollar is converted through the Mexican gold escudo of 3.383 g at 0.875 fine at two dollars to the escudo; routing the same sum through its silver content instead gives about 7,880 g, so the figure is best read as a range of roughly 7,500 to 7,900 grams.

~7,486.5g

Minute book of the Armenian Church of Saint Gregory the Illuminator, Singapore, transcribed in Buckley, C. B. An Anecdotal History of Old Times in Singapore. (Fraser & Neave, 1902), pp. 283–285; Wright, Nadia H. The Armenians of Singapore: A Short History. (Entrepot Publishing, 2019); National Library Board Singapore, BiblioAsia 20:3 (2024).