In 1771, the british Francis Light, the then a private country trader, aged 31 years, proposed the idea of a British settlement in the neighbourhood of the Malay Peninsular to Warren Hastings, the East India Company's Governor of the Presidency of Fort William. He suggested that the island of Penang might serve as a "convenient magazine for the Eastern trade" but at that time his idea gained no ground. For about ten years he had his headquarters in Salang, where he revived a failed French trading post.
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