Merlion Park

This guide to Merlion Park traces how Singapore invented its own mythology: in 1963, British ichthyologist Alec Fraser-Brunner sketched a half-lion, half-fish creature merging the old names Singapura and Temasek into a tourism-board logo. It follows local sculptor Lim Nang Seng, who spent nearly a year building the seventy-tonne statue, and Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, who unveiled it at the river's edge in September 1972. The guide then picks up decades later, when a new bridge quietly cut the statue off from the bay it was built to face.