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 some of these little-known episodes, from a crazy rain of fish and the discovery of a giant croc in the Rochor River, to a conundrum with tapirs and the delights of a zoo in our very own Botanic Gardens.

Of course, no compendium of Singapore’s animal stories can go without the legend of Sang Nila Utama—did he really see a lion, we wonder? —and the dramatic story of the tiger under the 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, the famous Ming Dynasty admiral Zheng He, and Charles Phillips, the former principal of the Raffles Institution who marches into these pages in his pyjamas.