Merlion

Region/Culture: Southeast Asia
Mythos: Southeast Asian Mythology, Urban Legends & Contemporary Folklore
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A composite guardian with a lion’s head and a fish’s body, joining Singapore’s founding legend to its origins as a sea town.
Role in Mythos: The national emblem of Singapore, designed in 1964 to stand for the city-state’s identity rather than to act in any older tale.
Relation to Humans: The Merlion was made for people, as a sign they could gather around and print on everything from stamps to keychains. Its most famous statue faces Marina Bay and spouts water for the crowds who come to photograph it.

Rain or shine, it spits the harbour back at itself. Eight and a half metres of white cement stand at the edge of Marina Bay, a lion’s maned head fixed above the scaled body of a fish, and from its open mouth a thick rope of water arcs out over the water it was built beside. Tourists line the promenade to be photographed catching the stream in a cupped palm, a trick of angle and patience that never quite works and never stops being tried. The salt smell is real. The lion is not, and neither is the fish, and neither, strictly, is the beast the two were welded into.

The name is a seam left showing. Mer for the sea, lion for the land, forced into one word for one creature that is half of each. Above the waist it is all cat: a broad muzzle, a heavy mane cut into stiff curling locks, eyes set forward the way a hunter’s are. Below, the body narrows and turns to overlapping scales, a fish’s flank ending in fins and a curled tail. There is no organic logic holding the halves together. A committee decided they belonged, and the decision held.

The creature is younger than many of the people who photograph it. In 1964 the Singapore Tourist Promotion Board went looking for a symbol the new country could put on its brochures, and the job fell to Alec Fraser-Brunner, a British ichthyologist who ran the Van Kleef Aquarium and sat on the souvenir committee. He drew a lion’s head onto a fish’s body and called the result a Merlion. The board adopted it on the twenty-sixth of March that year and registered it as a trademark two years later. Every part of it was chosen, not inherited.

Each half carries a piece of the island’s story. The fish is Temasek, the old name for the settlement, a word for a sea-town, and a nod to the fishing village that clung to the river mouth long before the towers came. The lion is older and stranger. The Sejarah Melayu, the Malay Annals, tell of a prince named Sang Nila Utama who sailed from Palembang and landed on Temasek. Out hunting, he glimpsed a swift russet animal with a black head and a white breast, and was told it was a lion, so he renamed the place Singapura, the lion city. No lion has ever lived wild on Singapore. Whatever the prince saw, and the Annals are the only witness, it was something else wearing a lion’s reputation.

The emblem needed a body in the world. A local sculptor, Lim Nang Seng, was commissioned to build it from a design credited to Kwan Sai Kheong, and he raised it across ten months in 1971 and 1972, seventy tonnes of cement rising on a frame of steel. His eight children helped him. The younger ones shaped the body while the older ones climbed the scaffolding to finish the eyes and the mouth. On the fifteenth of September 1972 the prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, unveiled it at the mouth of the Singapore River and said he hoped it would come to mean Singapore the way the Eiffel Tower means Paris.

For thirty years it faced the sea from the river’s mouth, a smaller cub statue standing at its back, both of them spouting water day and night. Then the land shifted around it. A new bridge cut off the view, and in 2002 the whole seventy-tonne figure was lifted and carried over two days to a fresh platform beside the bay, where it stands now. Others were made under licence: a glazed one at Tourism Court, one on the slope of Mount Faber, and for a while a thirty-seven-metre giant on Sentosa with viewing galleries in its head and lasers set in its eyes, until that one was demolished in 2019.

What the Merlion does, it does as a sign. It stands over the harbour that made the country rich, mouth open, endlessly returning water to the water, and it has become the thing a visitor photographs to prove they were here. Its strength is entirely borrowed. The lion lends courage and a founding legend; the fish lends the sea and the plain memory of a poor fishing village; the statue lends a place to stand and aim a camera. Take those away and little remains, because there was never a myth beneath it. The Merlion has no cycle of tales, no rival, no death, no moment in which it itself does anything. It was reasoned backward from a logo, given a body in cement, and left to gather meaning by being looked at.

That is also the whole of its weakness. A creature with no story cannot be undone by one, and it can only lose what it was lent. Move the statue and the crowds follow it. Pull one down, as on Sentosa, and the others carry on spouting. A country not yet a decade old wanted a face, and a fish with a lion’s head was the one it chose. Rain still falls on it, and it still spits the harbour back.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Merlion?

The Merlion is the national symbol of Singapore, a mythical creature with the head of a lion and the body of a fish. It was designed in 1964 as a tourism emblem and is best known from the large cement statue that spouts water over Marina Bay.

What does the Merlion symbolize?

The Merlion joins two parts of Singapore’s history. The lion’s head refers to the legend of Sang Nila Utama, who is said to have seen a lion on the island and named it Singapura, the “lion city,” while the fish body represents Singapore’s origins as Temasek, a humble fishing village by the sea.

Who created the Merlion and when?

The Merlion was designed by Alec Fraser-Brunner, a British ichthyologist on the Singapore Tourist Promotion Board’s souvenir committee, and adopted on 26 March 1964. The famous statue was later sculpted by Lim Nang Seng and unveiled at the mouth of the Singapore River on 15 September 1972.

Where is the Merlion statue and how big is it?

The original Merlion statue stands at Merlion Park beside Marina Bay in Singapore, where it was moved in 2002 after a bridge blocked its earlier view at the river mouth. It is about 8.6 metres tall and weighs roughly 70 tonnes, made of cement, with water jetting continuously from its mouth.

Is the Merlion an ancient myth?

No. The Merlion is a modern invention, created in 1964 rather than handed down through folklore. While its lion element draws on the older Malay legend of Sang Nila Utama, the creature itself has no traditional tales and was designed specifically as a symbol for Singapore.