Melaka -- Overrated?

An old draft, but these are my thoughts after a visit to the historic town in late May 2023:

I think Melaka's commercial importance in the past was probably overrated. It was an independent sultanate only for a little more than a century from 1403 to 1511. After that, the Portuguese destroyed and scattered the trading networks that made Melaka an Asian emporium. The Portuguese never managed to reconstruct the networks that made Melaka successful, nor did the Dutch who took it from the Portuguese in 1641. By the time the British East India Company took it over in 1795 to prevent it from falling into French hands, there was not much commercial value in holding on to it, except to prevent the French from establishing themselves on the Straits of Melaka, i.e. for geopolitical reasons.

After Singapore was founded in 1819 and the Anglo-Dutch Treaty signed in 1824, Melaka was essentially kept by the British for completeness of their domination over the Malay Peninsula. There would be no foreign European settlement in their sphere of influence, just as there would no non-Dutch settlement in the Dutch East Indies. This does not speak to the importance of Melaka. In fact, it lapsed into a backwater in Singapore's shadow.

Let's see if it becomes important again under an independent, sovereign Malaysian government and renewed links with China harking back to the time of Cheng Ho.