Taoist Folk Goddesses of Singapore

[Music playing]

Jimmy
You’re listening to BiblioAsia+, a podcast produced by the National Library of Singapore. At BiblioAsia, we tell stories about Singapore’s past: some unfamiliar, others forgotten, all fascinating.

Thanks for joining me today. My name is Jimmy Yap, and I’m the editor-in-chief of BiblioAsia, a publication of the National Library of Singapore. Singapore is a place where many religions coexist. But it’s more than that. It’s also the birthplace of goddesses – goddesses like Maiden Lim, Maiden Lei and Maiden Huang who have been worshipped in Singapore for maybe a hundred years. Sadly, because of urban redevelopment, these local goddesses no longer have standalone shrines. Today, the statues of Maiden Lim and Maiden Lei sit on an altar in the Chin Leng Keng temple in Bukit Merah, while the tablet of Maiden Huang is housed in a columbarium in Wat Ananda, the oldest Thai Buddhist temple in Singapore. Here to tell us more about them is Ng Yi-Sheng. Yi-Sheng has researched on these local goddesses, and he’s written an article in BiblioAsia about them. Yi-Sheng is a poet, fictionist, playwright and researcher. He’s also won the Singapore Literature Prize, and not once, but twice. The first for his debut poetry collection entitled last boy (opens in new tab), and a few years later, for Lion City (opens in new tab), his collection of short stories. Welcome to the BiblioAsia+, Yi-Sheng.

Yi-Sheng
Hi.

Jimmy
Maybe for the people who haven’t read your piece in BiblioAsia, can you give us a quick pocket history of these three people, maybe starting with Maiden Lim.

Yi-Sheng
The story that the caretaker told me about Maiden Lim is that she was just this ordinary woman, quite virtuous, living in Kampong Henderson, maybe about a hundred years ago. Her husband was a sailor. There was a man in her village called, I think, Mr Tan, who was really attracted to her. So what he did was he made her husband believe that she was being unfaithful. According to some stories, the husband killed her. In other stories, she killed herself by jumping into a well. But her spirit was sensed in the village. Mr Tan, the guy who sabotaged her, ends up going crazy and driving a nail into his own head. So people said, ‘Let’s just build a shrine.’ It was quite popular. It seems that women would often pray there for chap ji kee numbers, lottery numbers.

Jimmy
This was around the turn of the 20th century?

Yi-Sheng
Well, the dates seem to be very unclear. The caretaker, Huang Yahong, told me it was about a hundred years ago, and he knows an old woman who was alive at the time of the incident.

Jimmy
He actually knew of this lady.

Yi-Sheng
We don’t have a lot to prove that she existed as a historical figure.

Jimmy
The shrine was built along…

Yi-Sheng
Along Kampong Henderson, on Henderson road.

Jimmy
Then after that, the shrine was worshipped presumably mainly by the people who lived in the kampong?

Yi-Sheng
Yes. Although it seems that her story was passed around. Even my mother who lived in the north of Singapore at Hylam Sua = said her mum had heard of Lin Guniang [Maiden Lim] and there was a different story claiming that she had suffered sexual violence. That’s all she was able to tell. There are probably quite a few other Lin Guniang stories floating around.

Jimmy
The shrine was here on Henderson Road, but it got moved at some point, right? What’s the story behind that?

Yi-Sheng
Well, this is where it gets political. You see, by the late ’70s, Singapore was doing a lot of urban redevelopment. What the folks at Chin Leng Keng, Lin Guniang’s shrine, tell me is that there was also a Hindu shrine in the area. I haven’t been able to get independent corroboration of this, but my father says there was an Indian community there, so it’s possible. The Hindu shrine gets told, “You guys have to relocate because we’re doing redevelopment.” And they say, “You guys are being racist. You’re not telling the Chinese shrine to relocate.” So they say, “Okay, well, we’ll also tell Lin Guniang’s shrine to relocate.” And Lin Guniang’s shrine goes to this temple that doesn’t exist anymore called Yuan Tong Si. Things seemed to be going okay. There were lots of people going to that temple to pray for chap ji kee numbers.

Jimmy
And this is the 1970s.

Yi-Sheng
Yes. I haven’t been able to get a clear, fixed date in the ’70s. But we know that in 1977, specifically on the 13th February 1977, something quite dramatic happens. That year, the MP [member of Parliament] for Bukit Merah, Lim Guan Hoo, he collapses from a stroke while at the National Stadium observing a ceremony. A few hours later, the MP for Radin Mas, N. Govindasamy, dies of heart attack in his own home. This is the 13th February 1977 and the wee hours of Valentine’s Day 14th February, and it gets reported on Valentine’s Day 1977. It’s front page.

Jimmy
That’s what people would say, attributing untimely deaths to the shines’ removal.

Yi-Sheng
But people get spooked. People in the civil service as well as on the ground. And the caretaker says there were other deaths happening as well. So one thing that happens is this grassroots leader decides to move Lin Guniang to the new combined temple that’s made out of other temples which have been demolished.

Jimmy
This is the one in Bukit Merah?

Yi-Sheng
Yes, and that’s her current place, which is called Zhen Long Gong in Mandarin, or Chin Leng Keng in Hokkien. Specifically, she’s on the altar of Zhen Ren Gong, which is one of the subsidiary temples. They have people bearing the patron god, Baosheng Dadi, on a sedan chair. They go into a trance, and he actually gives his approval in writing by making marks in ashes with this sharp tip on the sedan chair.

Jimmy
This is the point where they move the the altar to the new temple?

Yi-Sheng
Yes. It seems like this happened around 1980 or ‘81, according to the caretaker Huang Yahong. It’s hard to get a specific date. It didn’t happen overnight. This was actually when the current united temple, Zhen Long Gong, or Chin Leng Keng, was already… The grassroots leader’s name was Yeo Chin Hua. He was on the board and his son still helps to give her offerings on the seventh day of the seventh month. Sorry, no, the 15th day of the seventh month. And people still pray to her. It’s not a huge number of people. She’s not as well known. Interestingly enough, when they need things from LTA or the civil service, somehow things get done quite quickly and promptly. Just in case!

Jimmy
Let’s hope they don’t consult her for library fines. Can I find out, what about the other goddesses? You have Maiden Lei as well, right?

Yi-Sheng
Lei Niangniang’s [Maiden Lei’s] story is not clear. What the caretaker says… and Huang Yahong has been there since ‘74, so he’s seen a lot of things. He thinks she’s been there from the ’50s, but she didn’t do anything remarkable with her life. She didn’t have a remarkable life story. After she passed away, her spirit was sensed in the kampong – and this is Kampong Henderson as well – so she also got a shrine.

Jimmy
Oh, she was also from Kampong Henderson.

Yi-Sheng
Yeah, but she was strange because we don’t have a story of how she ended up in Zhen Long Gong. But I should say even though we know so little about Lei Niangniang, she and Lin Guniang get equal billing. Their names are printed next to each other on the lanterns, on the brazier. Their statues stand next to each other.

Jimmy
Tell us about Maiden Huang. That’s a third goddess that you write about. What do we know about her?

Yi-Sheng
Huang Guniang, or Ng Kor Niu, lived around Kampong Silat, which was called Gu Ah Sua in Hokkien back then. The story that I got from the Taoist priest Jave Wu’s website, which seems have been circulating quite a bit – I’m not sure of its origin – is that she was born in 1866 on the 12th day of the sixth lunar month, and she became a nurse at the Singapore General Hospital. But in the year 1901 she was trying to rescue people in a fire in her kampong. A house collapsed on her and she perished. After that, she had a shrine that was seen in the Heng San Teng temple on Jalan Bukit Merah, and that burned down in 1992. Probably around this time – although I don’t have a clear beginning date – we saw a shrine to her appear in the Singapore General Hospital area. She actually got a lot of patients and family members of patients who were praying to her. Now, one odd thing is that in 2017 when her shrine at the Singapore General Hospital was being moved, the Xinmin Ribao interviewed a 66-year-old resident of Kampong Silat, and he actually had a very different story. He claimed that she was a woman who had killed herself for love after her family had matchmade her to someone else. That’s why her spirit was being pacified in the temple as well. It’s unclear which story is true either.

Jimmy
Or if any of them is. Maiden Huang’s altar is located on the grounds of the Singapore General Hospital, but it’s no longer there.

Yi-Sheng
In 2017, when SGH decided to do some redevelopment work. Well, having learnt from previous mistakes, they were like, okay, we have to do this properly. So they consulted Taoist priests who had to pray to her and invite her through a ceremony to go elsewhere. We’ve got these gorgeous photos that friends have taken of the huge paper houses at the huge ceremonies that were done during this time. Surprisingly, her altar piece, which had ‘Huang Guniang’, her name, written there, seems to have been replaced with a more ornate and newer piece after that. And that was brought to Wat Ananda Metyarama, which is Singapore’s oldest Thai Buddhist temple. But it’s not in the main temple area; it’s in the columbarium area where other dead folks are being laid to rest. But, you know, there are signs saying that she’s there and her tablet is quite prominent, so she’s still being given her due.

Jimmy
It seems to me that all these goddesses are worshipped at shrines. Initially they had shrines in whatever location they are, whether it’s SGH or Henderson Road or whatever, but then these shrines get moved to temples. So it seems like it’s important that a physical manifestation is maintained somewhere. Can these goddesses, for example, be worshipped at home or do you have to go to the temple in order to propitiate them?

Yi-Sheng
Yeah, they are worshipped at home. In fact, something that I didn’t get into in the article was the fact that there are Facebook photos of this large shrine inside an HDB flat where people give offerings to Lin Guniang every year on a special day. They’ve got huge red cloths printed with her name and it’s actually saying “Hongshan Lin Guniang”, or “Maiden Lim of Redhill”. Even though there are several goddesses called Lin Guniang across the Chinese diaspora, it seems to be this one. But we can’t get in contact with them. Of course, this is a more major shrine. There’s a good chance that these goddesses – these largely forgotten goddesses who are seen as spirits of dead people – are worshipped on ancestral shrines as well.

Jimmy
Are these perhaps the three best-known goddesses in Singapore? Are there many, many more?

Yi-Sheng
Oh, there are quite a lot. It’s people like Ronni Pinsler who have compiled information about this.

Jimmy
Would you say that these are the some of the better-known ones? Are these the ones just in the south of Singapore?

Yi-Sheng
I would say they’re better known. That’s why Jave Wu, the priest, actually called them the “three immortal maidens of Singapore”. Which sounds very nice, but there are a lot. Many of whom we don’t seem to have any trace of anymore. Around the ’50s, there’s documentation of worship of Zhu Guniang. I have visited the shrine of Honghua Guniang in, I think, the Katong area. There have been writeups about figures called Liuxiu Guniang, Caifu Xiaoguniang. There are gods as well. There seems to have been a substantial cult to a teenage boy who died during World War II called Yang Tai Ye. The British press called him Hidden Lad, surprisingly.

Jimmy
Did he get hit by lightning or something?

Yi-Sheng
Yeah, I think he did. It’s strange because that’s not a very dramatic way, not a very martyr-like way to die. One thing I’ve started to realise is that it’s not actually the stories of these gods and goddesses which are necessarily so important. The documentation of Zhu Guniang says that she became venerated because when someone set up a shrine to pray to her, he got winning lottery numbers. It’s about how effective these gods are. I’ve been doing personal research about regional worship of folk gods, and there seems to be something quite similar going on with Vietnamese folk gods and goddesses. This emphasis on not so much on stories, but on is this god effective? Will this god give you what you want?

Jimmy
It’s very practical, right? Presumably the better-known ones are known for being more effective in giving you what you want, whether it’s money, whether it’s winning lottery numbers or whatever.

Yi-Sheng
But it is a chicken-and-egg situation: the more people go, the more success stories you’ll hear about. And you will hear success stories more than… But this is not to say that I don’t believe you’re effective, Lin Guniang. I still love you.

Jimmy
Right, okay. As Singapore progresses, is it true that there’s less and less worship of local goddesses as people either stop worshipping or they find different religions?

Yi-Sheng
Yes and no. The yes is that, unfortunately, Taoism and especially shamanistic Taoist worship is not seen as a very fashionable religion. My father is a baby-boomer generation. He’s actually said that he has Christian friends who tell him he’s being very old-fashioned for still carrying out Buddhist rituals. But you do have Buddhist revivals now because there is a great international Buddhist scholarly tradition. Even within the Singapore Taoist community, there is this certain sense of… From the scholarship I’ve read, this desire to make yourself respectable by de-emphasising the shamanistic, the trance, and saying, “No, we should talk more about the philosophy.” We still have these huge shamanistic Taoist ceremonies like the Nine Emperor Gods Festival. When Chin Leng Keng reopened, there were like 15 spirit mediums there. Ji Gong was there, Guanyin was there, Nezha was there. I saw all these gods coming to inhabit people’s bodies in the middle of an HDB estate. Grab drivers were just stopping to stare, and it was fantastic.

Jimmy
When was this again?

Yi-Sheng
Oh, just a few months ago. I Instagrammed it. It’s a huge procession of lorries going around. People say this is rare. I mean, this is real heartland stuff. The direction we’ve gone for a long time saying that, “Oh, Singapore has to be about rationality and science. So your religion needs to be backed up by a framework of rationality and science.” This doesn’t fit into that. What I’ve told people is that as Singapore, as any society gets richer, more prosperous, more internationally recognised, the more we get proud of the stuff that makes us unique, the more we get proud of the stuff that we used to hide away claiming, “Oh, we don’t want the neighbours to see this.” Hey, we’re already respected, we should be proud of our whole selves.

Jimmy
Thanks for talking to us about this. What are you working on now? Are you doing more research into these gods and goddesses?

Yi-Sheng
I’m not doing a special project right now. Like I said, I’m an amateur. If prompted, like if I get asked to, say, do another article, then I probably might. But right now I’m actually trying to do more background research. There’s a wonderful book called The Way That Lives in the Heart (opens in new tab) about Taoist practice in Penang that I’m reading. But that’s more of my personal interest stuff that goes along with my interest in Southeast Asian literature and history and myth. I do a book column, so I’m also trying to read more of the black diasporic races for Black History Month in February. I am also doing work for the computer game company I’m working for. I am trying to get my novels published overseas, one of which is a supernatural crime thriller and the other one is a retelling of the rise of Sang Nila Utama with actual historical research.

Jimmy
Oh, fantastic. These have been written already?

Yi-Sheng
Yes, these have been written. The irony is I realised I’m at a good enough point in my career where it would not be hard to get these published in Singapore, and I just want to see whether I could get these on a bigger platform. I don’t know if I can, but I’m just going to try for a while.

Jimmy
Yi-Sheng, thank you for talking to us about the goddesses. At this part of the podcast, what we do is that we ask our guests an identical bunch of questions, and this gives us a sense of who these people are and what they’re interested in. So, let me ask you: who do you think is the coolest person in Singapore history?

Yi-Sheng
I feel like it’s Habib Noh (opens in new tab). He is, according to folklore, an early-19th-century guy who came over I think from around Penang, probably a Peranakan. He comes to Singapore. They say he works as a clerk, but he goes into religious trances. He takes food from the market and gives it to the poor. And when they put him in jail, he just teleports to Mecca because he’s got mystic powers. He’s a keramat hidup, a living saint. When he dies, his tomb becomes a site of reverence for people of all races. The Maqam Habib Noh is still there at Tanjong Pagar. I’ve got friends who have been there to pray for their exam results.

Jimmy
Which historical figure would you like to have dinner with?

Yi-Sheng
I’m kind of curious about Rajendra Chola II. I’m interested in him because he was the Chola emperor who in the year 1025 went on an expedition and conquered/colonised a bunch of Southeast Asia, including Singapore. According to the Sulalatus Salatin, also called the Sejarah Melayu, while he’s in Singapore, he creates a glass submarine, goes to the bottom of the ocean, hooks up with a mermaid and that’s how Sang Nila Utama gets born.

Jimmy
Let me ask you: what do you think is the most underrated or intriguing period of history?

Yi-Sheng
I’m really intrigued by precolonial Singapore history. I feel like I’ve been very parochial just thinking about this in terms of Singapore history. So let’s widen this a bit. Precolonial Southeast Asian history is fascinating and complex. Full of larger-than-life figures. I mentioned Rajendra Chola. In Singapore history there’s the fascinating figure of Wan Sri Bini, the queen of Bentan who actually gave Sang Nila Utama funding. It says that he got from her the men, horses and elephants to found the city of Singapore. It also mentions that she invented the nobat, the royal orchestral tradition, and she visited Arabia. This is 13th-century stuff. There’s actually a lot of stories of powerful women as well as men in the history of precolonial Southeast Asia, especially Island Southeast Asia as well.

Jimmy
What book is on your nightstand at the moment?

Yi-Sheng
I’m reading African Psycho (opens in new tab) by the Congolese writer, Alain Mbanckou. I’m probably mispronouncing his name. I have an iPad in my bag because I’m getting my way through all of William L. Gibson’s 1156-page PDF about keramat (opens in new tab) in Singapore. Luckily a lot of it is pictures.

Jimmy
Complete the sentence: history is…

Yi-Sheng
Everything.

Jimmy
Good, I like that. BiblioAsia is…

Yi-Sheng
BiblioAsia is that sweet spot between academic journals and magazines for the masses. You know, I got a PhD. I’ve published an article about artistic representations of Raffles for Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, and I got approached to do it for BiblioAsia, and I was like, yes, now people will actually read this damn thing. I got to do a very different, perhaps more interesting, take on that. I really do feel like this is important.

Jimmy
For everyone who’s interested in learning more about what Yi-Sheng has written about the homegrown goddesses of Singapore, please check out Yi-Sheng’s article, “Maiden Lim and Her Sisters (opens in new tab)” on the BiblioAsia website. Thank you very much, Yi-Sheng, for joining us today. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, subscribe to the podcast (opens in new tab) and the BiblioAsia newsletter (opens in new tab). Thank you for joining me on BiblioAsia+.

Bonny Tan and Marsita Omar, "Keramat Habib Noh (opens in new tab)," Singapore Infopedia, published by National Library, Singapore, 19 August 2016.

Ng Yi-Sheng, “Maiden Lim and Her Sisters: Taoist Folk Goddesses of Singapore,” BiblioAsia 18, no. 4 (January-March 2023).

“Singapore Maiden Joins the Taoist Pantheon (opens in new tab),” Straits Times, 27 May 1989, 22. (From NewspaperSG)

William L. Gibson, “Unravelling the Mystery of Ubin’s German Girl Shrine,” BiblioAsia 13, no. 3 (October-Decemebr 2021).

This episode of BiblioAsia Podcast was hosted by Jimmy Yap and produced by Soh Gek Han. Sound engineering was done by Gibson Analytics. The background music "Di Tanjong Katong" was composed by Ahmad Patek and performed by Chords Haven (opens in new tab). Special thanks to Yi-Sheng for coming on the show.

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