© Ashgate Publishing Ltd Proof Copy 8 Materializing the Tiger in the Archive: Creative Research and Architectural History Lilian Chee ‘Invention is the only true intellectual act’ (Serres 1997, 92). In 2003, I began my doctoral research on the Rales Hotel in Singapore, a listed monument which had undergone extensive conservation and restoration works approximately a decade ago. I had intended to learn more about the architectural history of this building type – it being a grand hotel – with particular emphasis on its role as a social condenser during the golden age of colonial travel in Singapore and Malaya, speciically around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One of its more intriguing spaces was the old Billiard Room, which had achieved far-lung fame as the spot where the last tiger was shot in urban Singapore. It was reported in the local broadsheet that the infamous incident took place in August 1902 when a tiger, escaping from a native circus act stationed near the Beach Road reclamation site, took refuge in the undercroft space of the Billiard Room. The beast was spoted by one of the hotel’s bar ‘boys’, ‘staring through the low verandah railing on the hotel side of the Billiard Room’ (Straits Times, 1902). In no time, Mr C.M. Phillips, the head teacher from one of Singapore’s leading boys’ school, the Rales Institution located near the hotel’s premises, was summoned to the scene from his slumber. He had been to a fancy dress ball the night before at the Government House and was still nursing his hangover when he was called to the emergency. Dressed in his pyjamas, the head teacher proved to be a poor marksman as he aimed, ired, and missed the tiger several times, hiting the brick pillars of the building instead. After he managed to inally kill the beast, the tiger’s body was dragged out from under the Billiard Room by nervous bystanders. There were neither photographs of the ill-fated tiger nor of the uncoordinated head teacher. There was also no taxidermic specimen of the prize trophy. All that remains of this historical incident is the newspaper report, which ofers a blow-by-blow account of this ‘hunt’. The ambivalent report, titled ‘Shot at Rales Hotel – Under the Billiard Room’, gives the impression that the reporter and the hotel crowd were not impressed by Philips’s forlorn performance. Instead, sympathies resided with the majestic Brown.indb 157 8/2/2011 2:57:30 PM