The Scottish Officer Who Actually Ran Singapore for Its First Five Years While Raffles Was Somewhere Else

William Farquhar (1770–1839) was a Scottish Madras Engineers officer who had spent his entire adult life in Southeast Asia by the time the British returned to Singapore in 1819. He was born at Newhall in Aberdeenshire, joined the East India Company’s Madras military establishment in 1791 at age 21, and was sent to the Malay world in 1795 as a junior engineer attached to the British force that took the Dutch colony of Malacca during the Napoleonic Wars. He stayed in the Malay world for the next 28 years. He learned Malay fluently, married a local woman (Antoinette Clement, of French and Malacca-Malay parentage), and became one of the East India Company’s principal regional experts on Malay statecraft, trade networks, and natural history.

He was Resident of Malacca for 14 years (1803–1817), running the small port city as the principal British civil-military authority in the Malay world. When Raffles needed an experienced senior officer to take immediate operational charge of the new Singapore settlement in February 1819, Farquhar was the obvious candidate.

The founding

Raffles arrived off the southern coast of Singapore on 28 January 1819 with Farquhar in command of his small naval squadron. Treaty negotiations with the local Malay rulers (the Temenggong Abdul Rahman and, subsequently, Sultan Hussein Shah of Johor) took about a week. The founding treaty was signed on 6 February 1819. Raffles spent about ten days in Singapore establishing the outline of the colony’s initial administrative structure, then sailed for Penang and ultimately Bencoolen (his main posting on the west coast of Sumatra) on 7 February 1819.

He left Farquhar as the colony’s first Resident, with day-to-day administrative authority, a garrison of about 120 sepoys and 30 European artillerymen, and a set of Raffles-drafted regulations on Singapore’s governance.

Raffles did not return to Singapore for the next three years.

The first five years

Turning the Raffles concept into a functioning trading port was Farquhar’s work. His major accomplishments through 1819–1823:

He laid out the physical settlement — the street plan around the Singapore River, the commercial district north of the river, the European cantonment on the north bank, the Chinese kampong south of the river, the Malay and Indian quarters around the perimeter. The street plan still survives in the modern Singapore central business district.

He drove the recruitment of the initial population — Chinese merchant immigration from the regional trading ports (Malacca, Penang, Riau, and coastal China), Indian merchant immigration from the Madras and Bengal Presidencies, Malay settlement from Johor and Riau, European trading-house establishment. Singapore’s population grew from about 1,000 in February 1819 to roughly 10,000 by 1823 — the fastest demographic expansion of any 19th-century European-colonial port.

He built the revenue base by farming out collection rights on the Chinese opium, gambling, and arak (alcohol) trades, the standard practice of 19th-century European Southeast Asian colonial administration. The revenue farms funded the colonial administration in the absence of direct tax revenue from the early population. This was the central point of the later Raffles dispute.

He managed the diplomatic relationships with the local Malay sultanate, the Dutch colonial authorities at Batavia (Jakarta), and the regional Chinese trading-house networks. Farquhar’s fluency in the regional Malay-political environment was the reason Raffles had chosen him for the role in the first place.

The dispute

Raffles returned to Singapore in October 1822 for what would be his third and final visit. He stayed for seven months. The Raffles-Farquhar relationship collapsed during this period.

The central issue was policy. Raffles wanted to abolish the revenue farms on moral grounds — the farms profited from Chinese opium and gambling that Raffles personally disapproved of — and shift the colonial finances to direct taxation. Farquhar argued the revenue farms were the only revenue source the early colony could generate; abolishing them would bankrupt the administration.

The secondary issues were personal. Raffles disapproved of Farquhar’s lifestyle (Farquhar was living openly with his Malay-French wife and their six children, in a Singapore society where the European-colonial racial conventions were looser than the later Victorian standard). Raffles disapproved of Farquhar’s relaxed administrative style — personal access to the Resident, case-by-case decision-making, informal negotiation with the Chinese merchant community.

The outcome: Raffles dismissed Farquhar as Resident in May 1823 and appointed his own younger replacement (John Crawfurd, who would serve through 1826). The dismissal was announced publicly, with deliberate humiliation of the outgoing Resident. Farquhar appealed to the Calcutta supreme government; the appeal was partly upheld (the dismissal procedure had been irregular and his pension was restored), but the Resident position itself was not returned.

What happened to him

Farquhar left Singapore in December 1823 — after almost five years as Resident — and returned to Scotland in 1824. He settled in Perth, took his Malay-French wife and children with him (unusual for the period; most British-colonial officers who had taken Asian wives left them behind on return to Britain), and lived privately until his death in May 1839 at age 69.

He published one article on Malay zoology (Royal Asiatic Society proceedings, 1828) and commissioned a collection of approximately 477 natural-history watercolours of Malayan flora and fauna that he had assembled during his Malacca and Singapore years. The Farquhar Drawings, as they are known, are now in the collection of the National Museum of Singapore.

He did not publish any memoir of his Singapore years. The founding narrative of Singapore was written by others — primarily by Raffles himself in the History of Java and subsequent correspondence — and Farquhar’s role was minimised. The 19th- and 20th-century standard accounts treated Singapore as Raffles’s personal creation.

What he is remembered for

Modern Singapore historiography has recovered Farquhar’s role. The Nadia Wright biography (2017) treats him as the actual founder of the functioning settlement, as distinct from Raffles the treaty-signer. The 2019 Singapore bicentennial commemorations included Farquhar as a founding figure alongside Raffles.

The Singapore Botanic Gardens named a garden after him in 2019. The National Museum of Singapore’s permanent collection includes his natural-history drawings as one of the founding cultural documents of the colony. A Singapore secondary school in the Bishan district was renamed Farquhar Secondary School in 2018.

The street that runs along the north bank of the Singapore River — through the district Farquhar laid out in 1819 — has been called Empress Place since 1907. Before that, for the colony’s first 88 years, it was Farquhar Street.