The sprawling Empress Place lawn in front of the Victoria Theatre and surrounding roads underwent considerable landscaping works for the 50th anniversary of Singapore’s independence. The development led to an urgent need to archaeologically intervene and mitigate prior to the construction. Eight thirty-year-old mature rain trees were uprooted and re-transplanted in the Emplace Place lawn to create an unobstructed vista of the Victoria Concert Hall and Victoria Theatre national monuments. This complex engineering feat involved the employment of a 600-ton monster-crane and the construction of a 70 m long by 15 m wide and 3 m deep concrete trough for the five of the trees.

This is the largest and most complex archaeological excavation in the history of Singapore. The site was extremely rich and yielded some three tons of artifacts indicating that the area was a high trafficked and densely packed neighborhood in the pre-modern period. For 100 days the archaeology team worked 12-14 hour days and raced against time to rescue as much archaeological materials and data as possible.

The artifact assemblage was the greatest yield ever recovered from any archaeological site in the country. The artifacts were extremely diverse and many varieties of finds were encountered for the first time in Singapore. High quality imported Chinese ceramics, Qingbai (bluish-white) Buddhist devotee figurines, Ming Dynasty blue and white porcelain dishes, well-preserved timber planks demonstrating signs of shipbuilding knowledge, Islamic gold coin, and over 800 Chinese copper cash are just some of the finds.

The preliminary findings from the wealth of material culture enabled archaeologists to reappraise the chronology of medieval Singapore. The discoveries provided detailed evidence that pre-modern Temasek’s golden age occurred for about a century in the 1300s (with abundance of materials), and the settlement went into a hiatus in the following century c.1400s (no artifacts from this period were recovered), and saw a revival again from the early 1500s to mid-1600s (with objects produced and dated to these centuries).