Lion City: The life and legacy of Sir Stamford Raffles

At fourteen, Thomas Stamford Raffles was a junior clerk. Before he was forty, he’d enabled Britain to take control of the world’s most valuable trade route.
The Strait of Malacca: that narrow stretch of water where every cargo of Chinese tea, Indian opium, and Eastern spices passed between oceans. Whoever controlled this strait held power over the wealth of empires.
While rivals fought over established ports, Raffles saw what they missed. In 1819, risking official censure, he claimed a neglected fishing village on a fever-ridden island called Singapura - and changed history.
The Company would disown him. Tropical disease would take his wife and children one by one. A shipboard fire would consume his life’s work. Yet the settlement he founded on instinct and defiance became the world’s greatest port, securing Britain’s control of Eastern trade for a century.

From the colonial streets of Penang to the conquest of Java. From the humid jungles of Sumatra to a gamble on a forgotten island. This is the story of ambition, tragedy, and the man who created modern Singapore.

This novel is based on the true story of the founder of modern Singapore - who died in debt and largely unrecognised the day before his forty-fifth birthday.