01 A logo commissioned from an aquarium curator
The body that commissioned it, the tourist promotion board, had been created barely three months earlier, on 1 January 1964. It needed a recognisable image and had none. The Merlion was registered as a trademark on 20 July 1966 and served as the official logo until 1997.
What is interesting is that the country has never hidden that origin. Official sources say so in plain terms: the Merlion has no sweeping mythological backstory, it was born of a very practical need for a logo. It is a rare case of a national symbol that does not pretend to be older than it is.
02 The legend is old; the creature is not
It is worth separating the two, because they get constantly conflated. The legend is genuinely old: it tells of a prince from Palembang named Sang Nila Utama who landed on the island of Temasek, saw an animal he took for a lion and renamed the place Singapura, "lion city". The story is recorded in the Malay Annals, a seventeenth-century text placing the events around the year 1299.
The Merlion's lion head refers to that legend. The fish body refers to Temasek, the island's old name, usually linked to the Malay "tasik" — lake or sea — though its exact meaning is unsettled, and to its fishing origins. But the creature combining the two did not exist before 1963. There is no merlion in Malay mythology.
There have never been lions in Singapore. What there were, until the 1930s, were tigers.
There is also a zoological detail that makes the story better still. There have never been lions in Singapore or the region: the nearest wild population is in the Gir Forest, in Gujarat, some 4,200 kilometres away. Tigers did live on the island, until they were hunted to local extinction; the last wild one was shot at Choa Chu Kang in October 1930. The most common scholarly reading is that Sang Nila Utama very probably saw a tiger, or that the "lion" was a symbolic emblem rather than a literal sighting.
03 Eight children carving scales
Nine years passed between drawing and statue. The sculpture was executed by Lim Nang Seng, working from blueprints by the artist Kwan Sai Kheong. Lim had won the commission after standing out in a tourism board handicraft and design competition.
The best-liked detail in the whole story is documented by the country's heritage sources: Lim's eight children, aged between 11 and 23, worked with him on the statue, from the facial features to the body's scales and the tail fins.
Construction ran from November 1971 to August 1972, and the statue was unveiled on 15 September 1972 at the mouth of the Singapore River. It stands 8.6 metres tall and weighs 70 tonnes. A two-metre "cub", by the same sculptor, was raised alongside it.
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04 The 2002 move, through the air
In 1997 the Esplanade Bridge was completed, and the problem was immediate: the bridge blocked the view of the Merlion from the bay. A symbol designed to be photographed had stopped being visible. Several sites were evaluated and the current one was chosen, beside the Fullerton hotel, some 120 metres from the original.
The move, in April 2002, went wrong before it went right. The plan was to float the statue under the Esplanade Bridge. On lifting it, workers discovered an extra 60 centimetres of reinforced concrete beneath the base that nobody had anticipated: with that additional height, it would not fit under the bridge.
The solution was to lift it over. Two cranes of 500 tonnes each raised the statue's 70 tonnes and moved it in three stages, keeping it airborne for about five minutes with the avenue closed. The move and the enlargement of the park that came with it cost 7.5 million Singapore dollars.
05 Thirty-six years without a lightning rod
On 28 February 2009, between four and five in the afternoon, during heavy rain, lightning struck the Merlion. It dislodged a fragment of the mane and opened a hole in the wave-shaped base. Nobody was hurt.
The telling detail is another: until that day, the statue had no lightning protection system. It had stood exposed for more than thirty-six years in a country where it thunders 167 days a year. One was installed during the repairs, and on 18 March 2009 the Merlion started spouting water again.
One final practical warning, in case you go looking for a particular version: the Sentosa Merlion, 37 metres tall and the largest of them all, closed to the public on 20 October 2019 and was demolished afterwards to build a new walkway. It no longer exists. The others still stand — the 1972 original and its cub at Marina Bay, plus three more around the island — and the Marina Bay one is the one to go and see.
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