SINGAPORE ZOO
Who knew an enduring attraction like the Singapore Zoo was the brainchild of a young team with little knowledge of wildlife conservation? Led by Dr Ong Swee Law, the chairman of the Public Utilities Board in the late 1960s, the zoo opened in 1973 to resounding success.
Visitors could view beautiful but dangerous animals in their natural settings, sans cages, with some accessible via glass-fronted galleries. In 1998, the Fragile Forest attraction allowed guests to enter a biodome, right into a miniature rainforest to share the same space with creatures like lemurs, mousedeer, bats, birds and sloths. At the turn of the millennium, it opened The Great Rift Valley of Ethiopia where over 100 Hamadryas baboons could frolic and relax amid cliffs and waterfalls.
From being the first zoo in the world to showcase monkeys on narrowly moated islands in the ‘90s, relying mostly on “psychological barriers” to keep the primates within their habitats, the Singapore Zoo went on to allow monkeys (which had been handpicked for their calmer disposition) roaming within the park. On the subject of primates, the zoo paid tribute to its poster girl, the late orangutan Ah Meng, with a D24 durian tree planted at her burial spot within the zoo in 2008.