Feral cats & Singapore animal advocacy
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 1995:
SINGAPORE––The first feral cat in Singapore may
have been the animal for whom the island city-state is named.
He was reputedly a big one, with a red body and
black mane. When he lived and who saw him is mysterious.
Singapore in the fifth century A.D. was known to
Chinese sea farers as “Pu-luo-chung,” meaning “little town at
the end of a peninsula.” From the seventh century to the 10th
century the little town was Temasek, a Buddhist city-state.
After several centuries of obscurity, Temasek rose as
a regional power in the 14th century, passing from Buddhist to
Islamic rule, but was eventually destroyed by warfare. The
ruins were sparsely inhabited until 1819, when Sir Stamford
Raffles rebuilt the ancient palace grounds as the seat of British
government in Southeast Asia.
By then, the former Temasek was already S i n g a –
pura, meaning in Malay and Sanskrit “The lion city.”
Singapore mythology holds that the name Singa-pura
was conferred in the early14th century by the Sri Vijayan
prince Sang Nila Utama, who had sailed from Sumatra seeking
a place to build an empire.