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Shenggong and Li Shan Shengmu. Also noted in Hainanese temples in the vicinity of Kluang are Under Altars, usually connected with Cantonese temples, though again presumably "borrowed" by Hainanese. Only two such Under Altars have been noted - both are typically at floor level and contain spirits of tamed demons unfit to be honoured with places upon the main or side altars. Finally, not too uncommon in Malaysia and Singapore where ethnic communities live cheek by jowl, a dark-skinned deity in the Hainanese temple in Jalan Pindu in Singapore was identified as General Supramaniam, placed there by a local Tamil and with the usual tolerance of Chinese devotees, though not revered by them, he has incense placed before him by passing Chinese devotees who realise and accept that he is a foreign deity and not of the Chinese pantheon.
From 1949 until the late 1980s folk religion images were banned and removed from altars within China and therefore Hainanese deities have had to be researched mainly within overseas Chinese communities. To carry out the necessary research on Hainanese temples and gods it has been necessary to visit as many of the temples run by and in Hainanese communities outside China, mainly concentrated in Singapore, southern Malaysia and Cambodia. The regular visits to temples in Singapore over a period of years revealed changes within the temple community which would not have been apparent under normal circumstances. Accepting that the circumstances were unique in that the Singaporean authorities forced the resettlement of old and especially 'temporary matshed or corrugated iron' temples to the suburbs in the targeted population relocation of the sixties and seventies, a good example of the change was the resiting in 1984 of an atap hut temple, the oldest Hainanese community temple, in Lorong Ah Soo to a custom-built complex in Hougang Avenue 5. The layout of the altar images in the new Hainanese temple was unchanged as reflected in black and white photographs taken in Lorong Ah Soo in the late fifties and colour photographs taken in Hougang in 1985. The four custom-built temples, one of which is the Hainanese re-located temple, consist of a terraced row of four brick buildings, similar to two-car garages but with high ceilings and much wider than a standard garage.
In the years up to the 1950s not only did the diversity of language amongst the overseas Chinese in south-east Asia [Cantonese, Hakka, Hokkien and Chaozhou, as well as Hainanese] impose a real barrier