Singapore was a thriving trading hub hundreds of years before popular narratives depicted it as a quiet fishing village, according to a study of the cargo of a centuries-old shipwreck. Sometime during the middle of the 14th century, a merchant ship sank off the coast of Singapore. Now known as the Temasek Wreck (Temasek was the old name for Singapore), this is the earliest known shipwreck in Singapore waters. Not much of the vessel remains, but between 2016 and 2019, archaeologists excavated a 3.5-tonne cargo haul of Chinese ceramics from the seabed.