History of Singapore

Heraclitus said that “everything is constantly changing and opposites things are identical, so that everything is and is not at the same time”


My guess is that he's saying that when you change forward, you need to change backwards as well. But what is changing backwards? By changing the present to fit a fuzzy memory of a happy utopian past. Simply put, nostalgia, tradition, customs. However else you'd like to call it.


So to be a revolutionary civilization, forward thinking and always keeping with the times, it needs also to be grounded in identity and habits. You've probably heard this many times in different contexts.... that Singapore is changing too fast. Maybe we forgot to change backwards while we were sprinting forward at massive speeds. We sacrificed a slice of our heritage in exchange for economic and political stability. And to fill that gapping hole we feel, we created artifacts of history to adore.... the Merlion, Shangnila Utama, do we even truly know what they are?


But yea, seriously, now I'm distracted... who exactly came up with the story of the Merlion? I know Shangnila Utama thought he saw a lion, I don't think Sir Stamford Raffles saw anything other than the Sultan... And I remember going to Sentosa's Merlion where they had a little video of the legend of the Merlion where it rose out of the ocean one rainy day and stared shooting laser beams from its eyes. 
That's the version I told my friends when they ask about the history of Singapore.


I guess we can't really dig for archeological sites and we probably already destroyed whatever was left in the soil with the Circle line, so we're left with what the first bunch of immigrants who arrived in Singapore came up with while squatting by Singapore river eating Hokkien Mee.


Personally, I'd like to think that the Merlion was a very rare high level Pokemon.