When you travel east across Singapore, away from the towers of the central city, you eventually bump into an area called Tampines - named after a tree. The tempinis tree (or to be precise the ‘streblus elongatus’ – which sounds like something from Monty Python) is known for its hardy wood that once grew in thick forests in the area. Today they are few and far between - for obvious reasons a ready supply of excellent building timber was useful to not just the expanding city of

When you look at the Lion City Sailors badge, its meaning is fairly direct. A football, framed by a ship’s wheel, with the team’s name ‘Lion City’ written beneath. It reflects two long-standing features of Singapore: the lion as a national symbol, and the sea as the source of its trade, security, and connections. The name “Lion City” comes from Singapore’s older Malay name, Singapura, meaning “city of the lion”. According to legend, a Sumatran prince named Sang Nila Utama arr