The Yan, Ying and Sling in festive Singapore

THESE LINES are being penned in Singapore which is just recovering from its 15 most festive days of the year. The Sunday before Easter was Chinese (or Lunar) New Year's Day, ushering in a fortnight of festivities, the first two weekdays being public holidays.
Celebrations transcended religious differences and Singapore's Catholics were dispensed from fasting and abstinence on Ash Wednesday.
Thus began the Year of the Tiger in the "lunar calendar". Each year is named after a different animal in a-twelve year cycle. For, according to the Chinese, there are twelve animals in the zodiac — rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog and pig — stemming from the legend that they were summoned in that order to the Lord Buddah on the day of his enlightenment.
The animal astrological chart, I was told, can only be understood against the background of the Chinese YinYang principle, This is a concept of dualism wherein everything, physical and spiritual, has an opposite and corresponding condition.
Yang is the positive principle: male, light, heaven and sun. Yin is the negative counterpart: female, shade, earth and moon. Yin and Yang even have their designated hours of the day, an important factor in Chinese Astrology.
If you were born in 1902, — '14, '26, '38, '50, '62, '74 — or this year, your sign is the Tiger.
Tiger time is between three and five in the morning. The tiger is, of course, ferocious, and so therefore is the time segment when powerful Yang wrests sovereignty from retiring Yin.
Daybreak is reveille for the tiger, whose savage spirit dominates the character of tiger people. They are especially fierce if born at night when the tiger is at his savage worst during his nocturnal adventures.
But tiger people, it appears, are great respecters of human life, guarding it against the three traditional disasters: thieves, fire and evil spirits.' moment without coming on some sort of gaiety, mostly in the form of lion dancing which is synonymous with the welcoming of good luck and prosperity during the Lunar New Year.
Two pugilists don the mockup gear of a lion, one at the tail and the other bearing the weight of the formidable-looking head. The ritualistic movements in the dance require athletic skills and .stamina.
The dances are accompanied by frantic beating of drums and the clashing of gongs and cymbals. The so-called "northern lions" — originally from the northern part of China — are the most spectacular, being shaggy and grotesque and seemingly coming to frightening life when baited by the clowns.
The crowds, never, it seems, tiring of such spectacles, stare in transfixed amazement as if the lions were indeed living creatures.
Every movement of the dance has its own significance. One particular theme is called "plucking the green," whereby a red packet containing cash is suspended with a bunch of lettuce from a height of three or four yards. The lion must devise, a way of retrieving the red packet, thereby displaying a host of tortuous skills in the process.
Sometimes two lions compete for the cash. The ensuing conflict could hardly fail to excite even the most blasé viewer. Indeed there were few of these at any of the dances 1 witnessed.
Singa Pura
The lion is responsible for providing Singapore with its present name. It was originally called Temasek (Sea Town) but according to legend a certain Sang Nila Utama, prince of Sri Vijaya, landed at Temasek and saw a strange beast which he mistook for a lion. He promptly renamed the place Singa Pura, or Lion City.
The hitherto abandoned tiny island (though now packed with 2.5 million people) underwent dramatic change in the nineteenth century. The catalyst for the transformation was an ambitious young British official of the East India Company named Sir Stamford Raffles.
He had been born aboard the ship of his sea captain father off the coat of Jamaica in 1781 and started at 15 to work for that famous company which was a forerunner of today's multinationals — a vast political and commercial enterprise that helped to engineer Britain's colonisation of Asia.
Raffles soon worked his way to the top, having become lieutenant-governor of Java by the time he was 30. His life makes consoling as well as exciting reading. For Raffles, unlike so many of his fellow colonisers, showed genuine concern for the peoples of the regions he controlled. He was one of the few British officers who bothered to learn Malay.
Personable and eloquent, he managed to persuade the governor-general of India, Lord Hastings, of the urgency of establishing a settlement that would ensure British supremacy over the Malacca Straits. Thus did Raffles land in Singapore on January 29, 1819. He found the place thick with swamps and jungle and beset with local political-dynasit rangles.
He took advantage of the latter to bring back from exile the rightful heir to the throne of Jahore, Tengku Hussein, and made him Sultan. Within six months, Raffles could report that Singapore's population had surged from a handful of Malays and pirates to more than 5,000, mostly Chinese immigrants.
Not long afterwards, the islands "Resident", William Farquhar, appointed by Raffles, was knifed by an Arab, who was set upon by bystanders and himself stabbed to death. Raffles, forsaking his usual leniency, ordered the body of the murderer to be driven around town in a buffalo cart and then hung up in an iron cage for a fortnight.
Early death
Raffles died tragically young — in 1823 — as a result of a brain tumour. But his name of course lives on, not least in the hotel named after him, and founded by an American in Singapore exactly a hundred years ago. Its centenary celebrations added to the generally carnival spirit of the island during the last fortnight.
The famous Raffles Hotel retains, almost intact, its colonial atmosphere. Indeed this is carefully cultivated, right down to the composition of its daily table d'hôte menu, starting with Brown Windsor Soup.
Its celebrated authors bar would have you believe that Somerset Maugham and Noel Coward never really died but became reincarnated on this spot.
On one evening during our stay, a live tiger roamed the adjoining billiard room while visitors, including ourselves, downed glasses of the original Singapore Sling that was invented in this very bar.
The reason for the importation of the tiger went back to the year 1902 when a tiger was shot by the then principal of Raffles Institution under the hotel's billiard table. The manager took advantage of the presence in the city of Chipperfield's Circus whence a tiger, more alarmed than most of the onlookers, was pressed into reluctant service.
The tame tiger looked very miserable while photographers did their best to get some startling shots of him. But, said the manager, "what a happy coincidence in the Year of the Tiger".
The bizarre scene came to an end only when the Chipperfield boss said on behalf of the bewildered tiger "She doesn't like it", and ordered an end to the strange festivities.
Destruction
Singapore, closer than any other Asiatic city to the equator, continued to swelter in the February heat. Its shores are still. dampened by swampy beaches which support mangrove patches and colourful tropical foliage.
Once there were numerous monkeys, pigs and deer; now, there are few, and more and more land is being reclaimed to accommodate Singapore's ever swelling population. How can an island of little more than 600 square miles go on absorbing more people?
The islanders seem not to care. Indeed they are a carefree lot and one taxi driver, a keen member of the local St Vincent de Paul society, reported that Catholicism is making a comeback in this tight little island where, it is true, the churches are full and Mass said with dignified devotion.
It is a charming and delightful place and I move on, now to Malaysia, with no little regret:
I should perhaps add that possession of the relevant volume of the "Insight Guides" has been an invaluable enhancer of my enjoyment of this visit, so far, to Singapore, These excellent guides are published in Britain by Messrs Harraps and are probably the best guide books of their kind available.
Anniversary
There are various injections against tropical diseases which it was necessary Co have before leaving for the Far East. This column appears on a notable anniversary in this connection.
It was on March 7, 1780, that Edward Jenner presented the king of England with his book on smallpox vaccination. Was it the great breakthrough so long desired in a century when 60 million people in Europe had died from smallpox?
It had all begun when Edward Jenner, as a young apprentice doctor, heard a dairymaid who was being treated for a skin eruption, say "It can't be smallpox because I've had cowpox".
With Christian optimism as well as medical skills, he collected cowpox vaccine, inoculated volunteers with it, then later inoculated with smallpox virus. None of those inoculated with cowpox reacted to the smallpox. They were immune. Herein lay the origins of Jenner's great discovery.