Author Description

With much of old Singapore still covered in jungle, encounters with animals were not uncommon for those who lived here. Tiger Tales brings to life little-known tales of such episodes in Singapore' s past, from a crazy rain of fish and the discovery of a giant crocodile in the Rochor River in the middle of town, to a conundrum with tapirs and the delights of a zoo in the Botanic Gardens. Of course, no compendium of Singapore' s animal stories can go without the legend of Sang Nila Utama, the island' s mythical founder-- did he really see a lion, we wonder? -- and the dramatic story of the tiger under the Raffles Hotel' s billiard room. Along the way, readers also meet a cast of colourful yet real people from the past-- including Colonel William Farquhar, the First Resident of Singapore, Zheng He, the famous Ming Dynasty admiral of China' s treasure ships, and Charles Phillips, the former principal of the Raffles Institution who marches into these pages in his pyjamas.