The True Story Behind Ubin's German Girl Shrine

[Music playing]

Jimmy
Hi, everyone. My name is Jimmy Yap, and I’m the editor in chief of BiblioAsia, a publication of the National Library of Singapore.

Mirrors, lipstick, dolls. These are some of the offerings you’ll find in a shrine on Pulau Ubin that’s popularly known as The German Girl Shrine. Who is this mysterious German girl, and how did the shrine come to be? With me to talk about the shrine is William Gibson, a researcher who’s based in Singapore with an interest in local shrines. He’s also a former Lee Kong Chian research fellow. Welcome back to BiblioAsia+, William. Guten Morgen.

William
Yes, good morning to you. I’m happy to be here. Thanks for inviting me back.

Jimmy
Always a pleasure to have you. When you were last here, William, we spoke about the keramat on Kusu Island. And today we’re going to talk about the German girl shrine. So, you know, tell us a bit about the shrine. It’s on Pulau Ubin, but who is it dedicated to? Who is this mysterious German girl?

William
Right. The German girl shrine is located on the southern shore of Ubin near Pulau Ketam, which is a very low, almost a sandbank that’s located right off of Ubin and is located on what used to be the tailings of a granite quarry. It originally was on the mountain that was quarried away and is now a great big pond. I think they call it Ketam Quarry now. The original name of that mountain was Ong Lye Sua. And the shrine was located on top of that. The German girl tradition is probably fairly old, but is not the only tradition associated with the shrine.

The story that you’ll hear today is that at the onset of World War One, there was a German family living on a coffee plantation, on that mountain, or near that mountain. And when the British soldiers came to take the family away to intern them, the girl panicked and ran away and died. Either fell off a mountain, or hid in a cave and starved. There’re a couple different versions of that. And then her parents were taken away as prisoners. The callous British didn’t care, and the local people on Ubin discovered her grave and began to deify her. And from that point forward, she was sacralised. Later, when the quarrying works were approaching the site of that original shrine, they moved it to its current location, which is down closer to the shore. And that would have happened sometime in the late seventies or the early 1980s, really towards the very end of the quarrying works that were there.

Jimmy
And how did you personally encounter the shrine, or how did you come to know about it? When did you go in and view the place?

William
So I first came to Singapore in 2005 and was both well, I mean, I was unemployed and single and had a lot of time and used to go to Ubin quite a bit. And if you go during the week, back then especially, it was very empty. It wasn’t as developed as it is today. And I just kind of stumbled upon this shrine. You rent a bike and you ride around. It used to be down this dirt track and it was really strange. I’d never seen anything like this, you know, as a foreigner especially, it was this yellow wooden shack, and there was this altar, and it was joss sticks and candles, and it was smoky and weird and wonderful.

And I used to visit quite a bit. I used to really like riding bikes on Ubin, and I would go there. There were some newspaper articles even laminated and pasted on the wall. I didn’t think much of it at the time. I really like going, and I continued to go over for many years when I lived in Singapore.

I then went to Indonesia with my family for seven odd years. We moved back in 2019 and, I was having trouble finding work and looking for something to do in Singapore. We came back for my wife’s job, and so I said, “Well, I’ll go and visit the German girl and see what she can tell me.”

And I went back out there, and the shrine had been completely rebuilt. I actually rode my bike past it because I didn’t recognise it. And this got me thinking like, okay, if that can happen, what’s going on here? And that’s when I began researching the actual story, which led to the BiblioAsia article.

Jimmy
That’s really interesting. So it’s actually, I mean, you now become a bit of a scholar on keramat so it sounds almost like the German girl shrine kicked off this whole thing. Is that right?

William
Absolutely right. You know, I always left offerings at the shrine. I always light a joss stick.

Jimmy
Oh, did you really? Okay.

William
I’ve always felt that presence there. And whether that’s just the impression of the shrine itself because like I said, it used to be especially this little shack. It really was kind of, kind of powerful. Well then again, that’s my impression. I mean, faith is very intuitive. You sense the sacred. It’s not something you can literalise, I think, I went out there looking for something to do and wound up getting this. So three years later, you know, I’ve been working on keramat and I got the fellowship as you mentioned, I’ve got a book now on my work that’s being shopped around to publishers.

Jimmy
All about keramat?

William
Well, keramat and these Chinese shrines that have these keramat associations and traditions with them. So, yeah, it really was the German girl that kind of set me on this, or whatever spirit is there, set me on this kind of pathway which has led me to this place right now, actually.

Jimmy
You should say Danke mein fraulein.

William
Yeah. Danke mein fraulein.

Jimmy
You mentioned in your BiblioAsia article that there are, you know, a few versions of this German girl shrine, but then eventually we saw one official version emerge. How did that happen?

William
Okay, so in researching this, what I found out was that the different ethnic groups on the island had different traditions about the shrine, And I would later discover this is not uncommon in Singapore with datuk shrines like this, and similar to what happens on Kusu actually, as we talked about last time.

So there was a Malay tradition, a couple of them actually. This was the grave of a Javanese princess who had come 100, 200 years ago and stayed there. She was cared for by a tong kang builder, a shipbuilder. And when she died, they put this shrine on the hill for her. Other traditions were that this was the grave of the shipbuilder himself or one of his workers.

One Malay man I was able to interview [was] Pak Ahmad. If anyone remembers, there used to be a Cookie Monster drinks stall on the island. That was his drink stall. He remembered visiting the shrine. There were never any gravestones on the shrine. But there were other things to indicate it was keramat such as yellow cloth.

Jimmy
Kain kuning?

William
Yeah, exactly. Kain kuning around the shrine. But no gravestones. Because if there’s gravestones, it would gender it. Malay gravestones are gendered. So that’s why you can have two different genders.

Jimmy
Oh, I see. Okay.

William
However, the female gendering seems to be dominant as far as the German girl tradition [goes], it seems to be the Chinese one, although she’s still called Datuk Maiden and that use of the word datuk. I mean, I guess we can get into this one. We’ll talk a bit later about termite mounds and all this. But that’s tied into this termite mound worship just like it is on Kusu. There’s a female datuk, two female datuk on Kusu: one’s younger, one’s older. In this case it’s a younger datuk that was, you know, sacralised.

Why the German girl became popular. I mean, I will go into, I think, sort of the mechanics of it and how it happens. It’s just a cool story. It’s an interesting folk tale. There’s zero historical evidence for it. By the way, there were no coffee plantations on the island at the outbreak of World War One. They had all converted to rubber by then, because there was a coffee blight, wiped out coffee. The coffee markets had collapsed. So that part of it’s definitely not true. This is also a really well-documented period. Both British and German records are accessible, and there’s simply no record of a German family having lived on the island at the beginning of World War One. Had there been a German family on the island, we know what would have happened. And yes, the men were taken away at one point by the British to be in an internment camp. However, the wives were left behind. So it wouldn’t have been this event where these soldiers showed up and, you know, took the parents away screaming and the kid would have run off.

It would be inconceivable that the British would just suddenly let this little girl disappear into the night and not mount a search party. There’s no record in newspapers of a girl going missing.

Had a young German girl gone missing on Ubin, it would have shown up in the press somewhere. So the story comes out of something else. The actual origins of that story I was never able to track, except a man who lived near the shrine for many, many years.

And when people started visiting the shrine in the mid-1980s, he started giving interviews. And I think over the course of 20 odd years, he gave something like 11 different interviews in both Chinese and English language newspapers and magazines, always telling the variations of this German girl story. He then, in an oral history interview, which is kept here at the National Archives, said that he was told the story when he was young by Uncle Foon Da, and Uncle Foon Da said that he had never seen this girl’s body.

All he knew was there was this mound that looked like it was in the shape of a girl and that he’d been told the German girl story. So it really is an oral tradition, you know, and very indigenous in this way. Why German? I don’t know. There could be a kind of an anti-British sentiment there because the British are the bad guys in the story, and it could be a kind of kickback against British. But there is no historical basis for the German girl itself.

Jimmy
It’s fascinating. And actually, you know, your article in BiblioAsia – what was very interesting was how you took all these elements and looked at them very, very carefully to sort of, you know, clarify what is fact and what is fiction. And I thought that was really interesting.

I just want to turn to talking about termite mounds. And you mentioned that earlier. You know, why is it that termite mounds become a site of worship? What is it about termite mounds that makes them auspicious?

William
Yeah, this is cool, because it covers multiple religions that you can find in Malaya, and I was scolded recently in a peer review for using that word because it’s anachronistic, but I like it because it encapsulates a kind of syncretic culture that came about because of all the different people that wound up here over the centuries. So if you look at Southern Hindu culture, there’s a famous goddess, Sri Mariamman. She’s got a temple on South Bridge Road, and there’s a tradition of her incarnating as a black cobra, and cobras use termite mounds as nests. So in India itself, in Tamil Nadu, you can find big termite mounds that have been dressed as an icon of that goddess.

Jimmy
Oh wow, I didn’t know that. And that’s interesting.

William
And she also has these smaller and lesser deities, devas who are called nagini, who are snake goddesses that are emanations of her, but also can be found in these termite mounds. And so to give one example, this still happens. This isn’t some ancient history. I was in Malacca not long ago in a kind of rural part and I came across some Hindu shrines up near a Hindu temple, and there was a termite mound that had a shrine built around it, and there were icons in front of Sri Mariamman, a nagini, and a black cobra. So this still occurs. Now we know there were Hindus on the island because when they worked [on] coffee plantations. They were workers that brought from South Asia, so they were there.

There’s an indigenous tradition also of termite mounds being the location of Puaka. These are nature spirits, very localised. They stay in one particular place. They can be good. They can be bad as they get Islamicised as Islam comes in, and those traditions become Islamiscised, often they were given names like Sayid to designate them as Islamic spirits. So therefore, they’re good. If they’re bad, they’re bad djinn, and you keep away from them. What’s very interesting is where the German Girl shrine is located is in a delta of a river called the Sungei Puaka.

Jimmy
Okay.

William
So there are Puaka traditions on site, older maps show Tanjong Puaka at the same location. These spirits would dwell within the termite mounds.

So now we’ve got a kind of a Hinduism and a kind of animism is coming in. And then we get Chinese tradition coming in, and this is mapped out in a very important article. It’s called “The Sinicization of Malay Keramat in Malaysia”. The author is Cheu Hock Tong. You can find copies of this online.

Jimmy
Where was it published?

William
He published a couple of different versions of it. One was published I think in the Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Asiatic Society, and the other one was published, I think, as a standalone through what was NUS back in the late 1970s. It’s very important to look at that because he maps out this process where Chinese immigrants have come in, especially in the rural areas. Malays would already be worshiping at a termite mound, and they would take on that tradition using their own earth gods that they brought from China.

Those traditions or Tu Di Gong, things like this. And eventually these localised deities became what’s known as datuk. So it is not uncommon to find datuk kong located at termite mounds, and in places like Penang, there’s still worship. You can find termite mounds that have Datuk shrines built around them where they continue to worship. So given all of that and stories that the German girl herself had fallen off the hill and then been covered by ants in the Malay tradition of the Javanese princess, it was said that when she died, her body became a stone.

So it seems like this was a termite mound that looked like a kind of recumbent figure. For some reason, she was gendered female. That could be because it was located near water. The shrines near water tended to be gendered as female. And you wind up with this later tradition of the German girl coming into it. But it seems like this start out is what’s called a Keramat Busut, which means an anthill keramat. Now, I’ll tell you this: my last visit there last year, whenever I was back there, I think, yeah, about a year ago when I was at the shrine, I was alone, except for a Hindu man who was worshiping at the shrine.

Jimmy
Oh!

William
Not Chinese, Hindu. And then, you know, so that shows that that tradition isn’t dead, that this there’s still Hindu worshipers about to go to the shrine. And that to me is interesting. It gives you a real kind of grounding on what the origin of this is and then the folktales that grow out of it.

And again, I want to emphasise, I don’t want to discount the folktales. It’s very important. And the German girl shouldn’t be sort of like, well, now that’s fake and we should stop talking about her. She’s a very important element. You know why she is German? Not all. That’s more of a kind of academic question.

The fact that she’s still of interest is very important, I guess. I guess if you want to, we can talk about how she has become kind of a celebrity, you know, and Singapore culture.

Jimmy
How did she become a celebrity?

William
Yeah, I mean, it was a kind of series of happy coincidences, I think. And in the mid-2000s, a new caretaker here took over the shrine and placed a Barbie doll on the shrine. Now, it’s not clear if he did that because it was an offering to the young girl, because people have been giving the kind of accoutrement you’d expect for a young girl, and as you said, mirrors and makeup and cosmetics and things, perfumes. So either the doll wasn’t there for the girl or is an icon of the girl herself because Barbies are Caucasian. So, you know, it’s a blond, white girl, and it represents the keramat spirit, the spirit of the German girl. That happened at about the same time the Internet became a kind of presence in our everyday life through smartphones. And then Facebook comes around not long after that, and it’s just viral heaven. You know, you can’t deny the power of this story of the haunted Barbie of Pulau Ubin.

And you see a lot of the titles that are very similar to that, you know, the haunted Barbie, and it just became fodder for the Internet. And so you wind up with blog posts and YouTube videos and travel blogs, and it just takes off. What happens then, however, is that the older story, it gets suppressed.

So the older Malay versions of it, like the Javanese princess, for example, will get almost completely forgotten in place of this exciting German girl and the haunted Barbie doll.

Jimmy
That sounds really interesting. Apart from people writing blog posts and all that, there was a TV show about it.

William
This was a theatre production which then became a telemovie. The director of that is Ho Choon Hiong, who’s a nice guy. I met with him when I was working on this research.

He originally went out there as a film student and shot a 17-minute documentary on the shrine and interviewed the caretaker of this. And that then inspired a local playwright named Lim Jen Erh to write a stage production called Moving Gods, which was produced in 2003. That then was adapted into this telemovie of the same name, Moving Gods. The director of the telemovie was Ho Choon Hiong, who was originally the filmmaker. So, you know, it’s a closed loop. It’s a beautiful film. It doesn’t tell the story the way you would expect. It is a kind of the story of the German girl that is much more abstract. The spirit is represented by this Chinese woman who wears a kebaya and has this encounter with this kind of brutish taxi driver who then winds up taking care of the woman, and she gives him luck. He wins the lottery because of her presence.

But it’s not the kind of literal interpretation where you have like a little blond girl run around the woods or something. It is a gorgeous film. I don’t think it’s easy to find. They gave me a copy when I was researching this. I should say the director did. But if you can find a chance to see it, it’s a very interesting interpretation of the story.

It was filmed on location, so you could see Ubin in the mid-2000s before it was changed. It is a beautiful film.

Jimmy
So let’s just be clear here. The film they are referring to is a telemovie rather than the original 17-minute film.

William
That student film is interesting. I mean, it’s got all the hallmarks of a student film is kind of roughly shot, roughly edited.

But it’s very fascinating because he was there interviewing people who had excavated. Okay, so when they moved the shrine, the granite quarry was there to move the shrine. I mentioned it earlier, so the company that paid to move the shrine brought out a Taoist priest to oversee this – this moving of the shrine. Not uncommon when datuk kong shrines are moved in Malaya.

They’re very common quarries, by the way, because the earth gods protect people who work in the earth. And so they excavated, exhumed, whatever this mound was. And in this student film, you found some of the people who were involved in that exhumation and asked them, you know, “What did you find? “And the one guy in interviews named Bala just passed away unfortunately since then. He has this look on his face like, “Are you are you nuts?” It wasn’t a grave; we didn’t find anything, you know. Other traditions say that they dug out of finger bones and an iron cross. If you looked very carefully at the stories over the over the years, those shift and change.

There is an urn on the altar that supposedly has the remains that they found in this. If you look at traditions of datuk kong shrines that have been moved for construction, usually they put an urn on the new altar as a way to accommodate the keramat spirit as a kind of home for the spirit. Usually these Chinese urns, meaning they went to the local porcelain shop and just got it, you know, an urn in the film. In this telemovie, they do a beautiful thing with this where the caretaker opens it. This was supposed to be the urn on the altar and a turtle crawls out.

Jimmy
Oh, wow.

William
As a kind of sign that he was doing the wrong thing, whereas the cab driver was doing the correct thing. It really is a gorgeous film. And again, it wouldn’t have come about if that student film hadn’t been made earlier, which is an important document, I think, of the time for us for understanding the origins of the shrine.

Jimmy
Yeah. Okay. I need to find out how to get a copy of this film.

William
We might have it in the National Library.

Jimmy
Okay, we will look it up.

William
Actually, I honestly [it] should be brought back because it’s Mediacorp. They could bring it back in. You hear me Mediacorp? You listening Mediacorp?

Jimmy
So the shrine, you know, has went through extensive renovation sometime in 2015. How does the renovation change the essential nature of the shrine?

William
Yeah, this is interesting. I mean, I spoke to the current caretaker, and I got to be careful because all these people are alive and I don’t like to name names. But the current caretaker told me a lot through an interpreter. I went out there, and I need to get a shout-out here to the Urban Explorers of Singapore. I needed people to go out there who could speak Hokkien, and they were able to put together a team of translators. And we went out there and interviewed quite a number of people over the course of the day. And so we interviewed the caretaker, and he was involved with this transformation. What I was told was that a Singaporean businessman was down on his luck. He went to a temple in Batu Pahat in Malaysia, where he was told he needs to build a shrine to a deity in Singapore. And then he rebuilt the shrine in Ubin. The old yellow wooden shrine was taken down, and in its place was what was essentially a Chinese temple. It’s made of granite. There’re this ceramic green bamboo window bars. There’s a Chinese tiling on the roof. The form of the roof is that of a Chinese temple. And again, this tracks very closely to the Sinicisation of the Malay keramat article. They really just mapped out perfectly where now this is kind of complete. It’s gone completely from being a nature shrine into, you know, a Taoist shrine. Those nature elements are only represented by a rock. It sits underneath the altar. Whether or not that changes – I mean, it physically changes the experience of going there. But that it’s in the same location at least. The other thing they did was they added a new icon to the altar, which is about a 3-metre-tall representation of the German girl. She’s holding a sprig of coffee in her hand.

So now on the altar, there’s the original urn. There’s the Barbie doll or a Barbie doll. And then there’s this icon to the German Girl. And because she’s supposed to be Christian, they put these little, like, cherub dolls around it. Like it’s in a painting by Raphael or something like this. So it’s really the syncretic elements are also all there. And like I said, I saw a Hindu guy going in and worshiping at this thing. So it really is Malayan. Maybe instead of being anachronistic, we can say that there is a kind of Malayan folk culture, Malayan vernacular culture. You won’t find it in other parts of the world, maybe bits of Sumatra and something like this, but it really is localised. So for me, that’s a good word to use to describe these kind of phenomenon.

Jimmy
How many times have you been to the shrine?

William
I used to go quite a bit in my first tour in Singapore. Since we’ve been back, there was the pandemic, of course, and we were all locked up. And now I’ve got a kid. It’s not easy for me to get back there. It’s more popular now. Ubin itself is more popular. More people want to go there and do the biking. And so the shrine itself, I think is visited a lot more now, which again contributes to its popularity because more people go out there, they discover it, they go online, they find these YouTube videos and things about the German girl. And the story has become an important part, I think, of Singapore vernacular culture because of that.

Jimmy
And whenever you go to the shrine, you say you light a joss stick. Have you ever asked for anything? Have they been granted? Have you won any money from 4D?

William
I’m stupid because I never ask for money when I go to these shrines. I don’t know why I get all these shrines that are famous for making people rich. And I went up never asking for money, but I wind up asking them for things like help. Actually help getting the fellowship.

Jimmy
Oh, really?

William
I asked for that, when I was at the German girl shrine.

Jimmy
Wow. Okay.  

William
I said, I’ve got a new book. I’m trying to shop to publishers. Help with things like that is what I ask for. I’ve never… well, I’ll take that back. That one time, I think I mentioned this in our last interview, but one time I did get a lottery number, and I went out and I asked for help, and I didn’t win. I was off by one digit.

Jimmy
Okay, it always happens. But, you know, you just have to have faith. What are you working on now?

William
I’ve been invited by the Friends of the Museum to give a talk at the Asian Civilisations Museum on keramat and heritage.

Jimmy
Oh, fascinating.

William
With an emphasis on the difficulties on preserving these things, because of the different value systems and sensibilities from different ethnic perspectives that are involved. It is not always a kind of linear way to preserve them, unlike, let’s say, a church or a temple, where, you know, it’s very clear, you know, how you would go about preserving it. When you’re dealing with the keramat a lot of Muslims reject it as a form of polytheism. Other Muslims embrace it. You might have Taoists coming in at the same site. You know, how do you preserve it? And whose narrative do you preserve, in other words? So that’s what my talk is going to be about in January.

Jimmy
And you’re working on a book and keramat as well.

William
It is done. I mean, it’s a 100,000-word manuscript.

Jimmy
That’s a long book.

William
Well, you won’t be able to put it down.

Jimmy
Okay. What’s the book about?

William
It’s called I think the current title is something like Sacred Relic, Forbidden Idol: The Keramat of Singapore. Okay. Dr. Teren Sevea, who is a local guy, a brilliant scholar and is currently at Harvard Divinity School. He’s a specialist in Islamic studies, [and] has said he would write the foreword to that book. And I’m in a dialogue with him about that. I think it’ll come together by in 2024.

It is based on my fellowship research, which came out as a very long PDF, and thankfully a lot of people are very interested in that. And a number of people, both scholars at places like NUS as well as heritage enthusiasts, local churches, have approached me with things I’ve missed, corrections, changes, sources, which have been incredibly helpful for me. And so putting all that together and building kind of context is what the book is for. So I think there’s a lot of stuff. Because of the internet, there’s a lot of information that I don’t want to say is incorrect, but it’s a way of extending the folk stories and that needs to be contextualised.

And with keeping a kind of empirical, materialist objective of the research to create actual historical fact, I use a lot of archival research, newspapers, maps and things like that.

Jimmy
Well, I mean, I have to say, you know, if you type in “German girl shrine” into Google, your name is like number one and number two on the search results. So congratulations.

William
I guess I’m in a strange position because I’m foreign. My Malay is not great. I don’t speak any of the Chinese dialects except for the swear words. I don’t speak any Tamil, you know, and I think it’s hard for me to… I have to find a way to legitimate myself in this kind of activity. And I always have to bear that in mind.

Jimmy
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, thank you very much, William, for doing this. I’ve not been to the German girl shrine, but I hope to go someday. But now we’ve come to that part of the interview where we do quick fire questions.

So. Cue music. Pam-padum-padum. What is the most unexpected offering that you’ve seen at this shrine?

William
At that shrine in particular?

Jimmy
Or any shrine?

William
I mean, it’s a hard question to answer because it’s I don’t know what unusual would be when you’re already dealing with a very esoteric, exotic, strange kind of experience. I mean, most people can just light a joss stick.

At the German shrine itself, you know, you’re supposed to bring things for little girls. And I’ve done that. I’ve bought like little hair bands and things, and you leave them on the altar.

Jimmy
Oh, oh, okay.

William
You see these kind of mounds of, you know, hair bands and hair clips and little dolls and little toys and things. You can get it, you know, inexpensive toys. That’s not that unusual, though, I came to find because there’s sometimes shrines for the wandering spirits, which sometimes specifically are for the wandering spirits of children. Sometimes these are even in temples. Sometimes they’re roadside shrines. And you’ll find the same kind of offerings there of cosmetics and toys and things like that. It is not common, but it’s not unusual.

Jimmy
Okay.

William
I’ve never seen anything completely weird and outlandish. There used to be food offerings that were made at keramat.

Jimmy
Oh.

William
Things like dyed eggs, eggs dyed red, telur bunga – flower eggs, they call it. Nasi kunyit, yellow rice. That’s almost all gone now.

Jimmy
So if you wanted to make a movie about shrines, which shrine would you pick?

William
No question, Radin Mas.

Jimmy
Oh, really? Why?

William
Because Radin Mas is one of the most fascinating stories of the story itself. Of Radin Mas, as we know it from the film and from Bangsawan, the story of the shrine, the mystery surrounding it, the way it’s become a kind of important plank in the Singapore early narrative and a kind of precolonial narrative of Singapore, the mystery of the name. You could do a kind of horror noir film. I think I’m writing my next novel already.

Jimmy
You’re welcome.

William
It definitely is a kind of horror noir centred on Radin Mas.

Jimmy
I’d read that.

William
Yeah, well, at least I got one fan.

Jimmy
Oh, yeah? Well, don’t quit your day job, though, okay? Complete the sentence. Historical memory is...

William
Historical memory is conditioned by authoritative narratives that want to hijack it for its own purposes. And I think the importance of vernacular traditions, even if they are ahistorical, like the story of the German girl, is they resist that kind of authoritative narrative. And in my own research now in keramat, I inevitably had to go back and look at things like, for example, Badang the strongman. That story has been completely taken over by the state and is used in National Day parades and things like this. But if you go back and look at the actual story and the origins of that folktale as it works its way into the Malay annals, you find something different, and in a way can be used as a kind of counterpoint to, at the very least, these kind of official narratives. And for me, this is when you look at historical memory, you have to look at those two different kinds. One is the authorised, and the other is the vernacular.

Jimmy
Okay, well, thank you very much, or, as we would say in German, danke schön Herr Dr. Gibson for joining me on BiblioAsia + To learn more about the German girl shrine. You have to read William’s article entitled “Unravelling the Mystery of Ubin’s German Girl Shrine”. We’re very happy that you’ve come back. William, I wish you good luck on your book. And you know, I hope you’re going to write again for BiblioAsia.

William
Of course I will. Thank you very much, Jimmy.

Jimmy
Thank you! Danke!

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William Gibson, "Unravelling the Mystery of Ubin's German Girl Shrine," BiblioAsia 17, no. 3 (2021).

Cheu Hock Tong, “The Sinicization of Malay Keramats in Malaysia,” Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 71, no. 2 (275) (1988): 45–47. (From JSTOR via NLB’s eResources website).

This episode of BiblioAsia Podcast was hosted by Jimmy Yap. Sound engineering was done by One Dash. The background music "Di Tanjong Katong" was composed by Ahmad Patek and performed by Chords Haven. Special thanks to William for coming on the show.

The BiblioAsia Podcast by the National Library Singapore tells stories about Singapore history.