The National Souvenir That Was A Love Letter First

Singapore's official national souvenir was a love letter first. A chemist made a careless promise to his fiancée in a garden in 1955, took 19 years to keep it, and the private gift he built for one woman became the thing the country handed to queens.

I've seen the RISIS gold-plated orchid my whole life. I never once wondered where it came from.

It became Singapore's standard gift.

Princess Diana was given a gold orchid brooch in London in 1982.

Here's what I didn't know until recently:

It exists because a chemist made a careless promise to his girlfriend. He took 19 years to keep it.

1955. The Singapore Botanic Gardens. Two young scientists courting among the orchids. She said she wished the flowers could last forever. He said he'd do something about that.

She called it, years later, a promise "carelessly made during our courting days for something I wished to have."

Her name was Engeline Lee Eng Nio.

First woman physics graduate of the University of Malaya. Fulbright Scholar to MIT.

His name was Lee Kum Tatt.

Then twelve years of nothing.

In 1967 he carried orchids on a trade mission to Eastern Europe.

His hosts loved them.

"I could imagine how a lady would feel to be given an orchid preserved in gold."

In 1969 he became chairman of SISIR, the national standards institute. The man who set the country's quality marks.

So here's what the head of the national standards body did next.

In 1973 a former staffer gave him some metal-forming solutions. He ran the experiments at home. Make-shift plastic tanks and rectifiers, after office hours, in his own house. A year and a half of it. The rejects were, in his words, "frighteningly high."

Then he talked SISIR into backing him. $25,000, out of its reserve fund.

His own staff weren't sold. "The general feeling of many was that we would fail."

He forecast $2 million of sales in year one. The product had yet to go on sale. Challenged on the number, he said it "can be likened to a Sunday Ice Cream. It is very attractive, sweet and appetizing but mostly nuts."

In 1974 he handed Engeline a bloom cased in gold. He named it after her. Oncidium Engeline Lee.

Nineteen years late.

Launch day was 19 April 1976. The manufacturing partner had fallen through. They incorporated the operating company three days before. Queues at four outlets. One orchid per customer. All 3,000 gone in a few mornings. Two weeks later they ran a newspaper apology for the empty shelves.

Year one: $1.98 million. He'd guessed $2 million.

Here's what stays with me:

A tourism committee had been hunting a Singapore image since 1964. By 1970 the word was that one had to be found fast. What they got was never designed for a market. It was built for one person. By a man paying off a promise from two decades earlier.

Build the thing you owe someone. Often the market for it is everyone.

Lee Kum Tatt died on 1 June 2008. The prototype for every gold orchid Singapore has ever given away still carries his wife's name.

What have you built for one person that you've never thought to offer to anyone else?