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protective deities, small portable images of the deity himself are kept in the shrine and loaned to devotees to take home for private reverence when the devotee has a personal problem requiring spiritual assistance.
In a temple in Madras Street in Singapore images of a Mr Ch'en and his wife, again without personal names, are revered by elderly ladies for boons and protection. No one within the temple has any idea who the Ch'ens are or where the images now on a side altar came from.
In a second temple in Singapore yet another image of a Mr Ch'en stands on a side altar. This time we know his personal names, Yueh-k'un, and that his image was donated in the 1960s by an unidentified old lady, thought to be his widow, who left a sum of money to maintain regular offerings before it. Its history and identification died with her. The image, of a stylised general, is prayed to by devotees who believe him to be a protective deity.
Liang Chin-chung was killed by lightning in Singapore, in a kampong in Tanglin, in 1946 at the age of seventeen. Shortly after the incident ladies in the kampong in which Liang had lived attributed remarkable events to his spirit and whenever they prayed before his tablet their wishes were fulfilled. A cult quickly developed and devotees came from all around. An attap hut already dedicated in the kampong to a Hainanese fertility goddess was altered to make room for a small altar dedicated to Liang, on which a rough portrait image of the boy was placed. The cult disappeared when the kampong was razed for building development in the seventies.
An image of a Miss Liu stood on a folk religion temple side altar next door to the big Buddhist temple in Kim Keat, Singapore. In 1962 she was known as 'Liu-hsiu Ku-niang', though this full name disappeared within the next ten years. Her image, swathed in silken yellow robes, always had incense sticks smouldering before it. She had no festival and no special identifying features. She did, however, have the occasional packet of face powder placed before her by girls who believed that she could make them more physically attractive. Also slung around her arm were two or three very small handbags or purses. According to an elderly nun, Miss Liu was a vegetarian who had lived in the nunnery, and when she died her old...