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Singapore
AsiaSoutheast Asia

Meet Singapore’s royal descendants living low-key lives as taxi drivers and office workers

  • In the 19th century, Sultan Hussein Shah’s treaties with the British led to colonial rule and the founding of the modern country
  • The Singaporean government agreed a payout to 79 descendants as part of colonial-era deal to provide for the sultan’s family

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Tengku Shawal, a royal descendant, says a prayer next to the tombstone of his great-great-grandfather, Tengku Alam. Photo: Reuters
Reutersin Singapore
In the modern republic of Singapore, several seemingly ordinary people working in offices or driving taxis can claim to be of royal blood, descendants of a 19th-century monarch who ceded control of the Southeast Asian island to the British.

But few residents in one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities are even aware of this lineage, a sore point with Tengku, or Prince, Shawal, acclaimed by some members of his family as “head of the house of Singapore”.

“They still exist?” is a response the 51-year-old says he often receives when he tells people he is one of the descendants of Sultan Hussein Shah – whose treaties with the British led to colonial rule and the founding of the modern country.

Shawal is one of several Singaporeans who bear the honorific name Tengku, meaning prince or princess in Malay, and claim links to the Sultan.

Until the turn of this century, some of them still lived in their ancestral home, a crowded, dilapidated palace, before they were evicted by the government which turned it into a museum.

Seventy-nine descendants, of whom 14 were living in the palace, were offered payouts as part of colonial-era deal to provide for the sultan’s family, the government said at the time. Many of the others were living overseas, it said.

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