>So when the Portugese found the way around Africa and landed in Calcutta on May 20 1498, the trade patterns changed forever.

This new route discovery actually significantly increased the importance of Strait of Malacca and Singapore, not decreasing it.

Actually even before that important turning point event, the European already knew about about the importance of Strait of Malacca including both the metropolis Malacca and Singapore/Temasek. The is one famous quote by a 16th CE Portuguese explorer Tomé Pires, who declared: "Whoever is lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice".

To say that Singapore was an obscure fishing village is disengenious by the colonial powers and those believing this wicked narrative are in denial.

My once top comment about this "elephant in the room" has been downvoted to oblivion, but hey c'est la vie. There's a very popular saying, "you can fool some people all of the time, and all people some of the time, but you simply cannot fool all of the people all of the time".

There's also a narrative that if the tea via land it's called chai and if if the via sea it's called tea [1].

The Ottoman controlled both the land and sea route to Europe creating the trading bottleneck from the European perspective for many centuries to the far East, they never close it. Thats's why both Dutch and British created their very own East India Companies about the same time around 1600 CE as the vehicles to trade in Asia once they found the new trading route around Africa to Asia. Due to their highly profitable business endeavour, their governments willingly become the side-kick colonizers for their new companies and becoming complicit to wrestle and overcome any countries that refused to their own unfair business arrangements, terms and conditions including trading monopolies.

[1] Tea if by sea, cha if by land: Why the world only has two words for tea (317 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16129454

[2] Dutch East India Company:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company

[3] East India Company:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company