The Merlion was a national symbol invented by the Tourism Board in the 1960's, more or less concomitantly with the expulsion of Singapore from the Malaysian Federation and it's establishment as a modern independent state. Making a new country means, among other things, making new metaphors and symbols and the Merlion was a prominent one. A turning point for the adoption of the Merlion as a personification of Singapore came with the 1979 poem "Ulysses by the Merlion" by Edwin Thumboo, a native-born academic and one of the founding fathers of English Singaporean literature. The poem speaks to the far-flung, disparate origins of the people of Singapore and the value of unifying symbols to construct a national identity beyond the consumerism and economic forces that drove people together here, and also strikes chords that are becoming familiar to me around ethnic and racial coexistence. Full text of the poem can be found online here: https://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/ellthumb/site/poems/ulysses.html at Edwin Thumboo's university website, in all it's early-aughts web design glory!
I'm most impressed by that crazy triple building with a giant platform across them.
ReplyDeleteAnd apparently Blogger doesn't recognize my Google log in. This is Chad.
DeleteIt's hard to tell from this picture, but the platform supports a small park/garden full of palm trees and restaurants. It turns out that reinforced concrete will let you do _basically_ anything you want under about 100 stories.
DeleteThat's the Marina Bay Sands, it also has a very large infinity pool for hotel patrons for about $400 a night. For the cost of $10-20 you can get a beverage and enjoy the city and gardens on the bay from above, go just before sunset. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marina_Bay_Sands
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