Feral cats & Singapore animal advocacy
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, July/August 2005:
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 Singa-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.