Before Singapore became the bustling economic epicenter of Southeast Asia, it was just like everybody else in the region, until the British came and renovated the whole place, and much later, Lee Kuan Yew turned it into what it is today. However, when Sir Stamford Raffles came in the 1800s, there was a boulder, three meters wide and three meters tall, at the mouth of Singapore river. The mysterious thing about this boulder was that nobody knew how it got there, and there was some inscription on it that no one could decipher. Unfortunately, the East India Company blew up that boulder and only fragments remain today.
Legend has it that the origin of the boulder was when a strongman by the name of Badang threw the boulder in a contest between the strongmen of the kingdoms of Singapore and India. As for the inscription, Sir Stamford Raffles had surmised that the inscription was Hindu, since they had traveled far and wide, reaching even Bali and Java. Others also suggested that the inscription might have been ancient Ceylonese (Sri Lankan), Pali (Middle Indo-Aryan), Tamil, or Kawi.
(Image credit: Choo Yut Shing/Wikimedia Commons)