Eurasian Singaporeans

Eurasian Singaporeans are Singaporeans of mixed European and Asian descent. Their Asian ancestry trace from Colonial India to other colonies while their European ancestry trace back to western Europe primarily, although Eurasian settlers to Singapore in the 19th century came largely from other European colonies. These included British Malaya and British Sarawak, part of the former British Raj India, of the former Portuguese India and Chittagong (today in Bangladesh), the Dutch East Indies and French Indochina. When the European maritime powers colonised Asian countries, such as Colonial India, Ceylon, Malaya, Singapore, Indonesia and Indochina, from the 16th to 20th centuries, they brought into being a new group of commingled ethnicities known historically as Eurasians. Early Europeans were primarily male and often had children with local women. Initially, the offspring of such a union were brought up as an appendage of European culture, enjoying further advantages not generally accorded to the rest of the local Asian people. The first documented Europeans to visit Southeast Asia were the Romans and Italians. In 166 AD, a Roman mission travelled to China via modern day Vietnam, bringing presents of elephant tusk, rhinoceros horn, and tortoise shell from Southern Asia. Archaeological evidence supports the claim in the Weilüe and Book of Liang that Roman merchants were active in northern Vietnam. Between 1275 and 1292, Marco Polo spent 17 years as an emissary of Kublai Khan, visiting tributary kingdoms in modern day Indonesia, Myanmar, Sri Lanka and Vietnam. In the 1320s, Odoric of Pordenone visited Borneo, Champa, and Java. In the 1420s, the Venetian merchant and explorer Niccolo de' Conti married an Indian woman, and travelled extensively in modern day Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam. Before the arrival of the Dutch, English and French in Asia, the first Europeans to land and seize territory in Asia were the Portuguese. Portuguese spice-traders first sailed to Malacca in 1509, having already established settlements in Goa and other parts of India.