Naraina Pillai
Singaporean businessman
Narayana Pillai (also spelled Narayana Pillay) was a social entrepreneur and businessman, who spent most of his life in Singapore during the colonial period. Of Tamil origins, he greatly contributed to the Tamil community in Singapore.
Prior to 1819, Pillai worked in Penang, which was ruled by the British. There, he came into contact with Stamford Raffles, a senior official of the British East India Company, who was keen to establish a new trading post at the southern end of the Straits of Malacca. This resulted in the founding of modern Singapore in 1819. In Penang, Raffles persuaded Pillai to join him and to work at his new settlement.
Early life
Pillai arrived in Singapore with Raffles in 1819 on the ship.
Businesses
With the establishment of a modern urban settlement in Singapore, Pillai noticed a boom in building works. He wrote to his contacts in Penang to send bricklayers, carpenters and cloth merchants to Singapore. He then established the island’s first brick kiln at what is now Tanjong Pagar.
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This entry incorporates text from “Naraina Pillai” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.