ABSTRACT
As the subject of colonial and imperial imagination, Singapore’s architectural history is shaped by narratives and archives that characterise it as triumphantly emergent from the cacophonous tropics. Other to this form of architectural knowing are notable forms of evidence that embrace the tropic’s unruliness, animality and fecundity. This chapter examines such forms of evidence in the anecdotal and literary, chiefly through writings about the tropics by Arundhati Roy and George Orwell. It homes in on an anecdote from Singapore’s famed Raffles Hotel, in which a tiger was variously reported to have been found under the Billiard Room, in the Billiard Room and under a billiard table. I explore the disagreement over the veracity of the incident via its production of architectural knowledge about the Raffles Hotel. Through analysis of the literary and anecdotal accounts of ‘Stripes’ the tiger, I reveal how the masculine space of the Billiard Room is sustained by the imagination and humanity of a feminine form of storytelling, ultimately contrasting this extraordinary founding tale to its colonial narrative.
