National Museum of Singapore

This guide to the National Museum of Singapore opens with a massive inscribed sandstone slab uncovered at the Singapore River in 1819, so unsettling that the work crew clearing it refused to continue. It follows the scholarly disputes over what language the carving was even written in, and the 1843 order from a British army engineer that changed the stone's fate for good. Along the way it traces the museum's own building, opened in 1887 in neo-Palladian style under colonial engineer Henry McCallum, with a fish-scale dome that still catches the morning light.