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skinned, whilst the other had been put to work supervising the father's labourers in the fields and whose skin had been burned black. The elder was said to be depicted at thirteen years of age whilst the second was two years younger. Ruan, the younger prince, is portrayed with a fierce expression whilst the elder has a gentler look despite not having any eyebrows. Both tend to be depicted with white [pink] or black skin, and are barefoot. Both are dressed simply, in trousers and a small apron. They wear golden bracelets on their forearms and their head-dress consists of a gilded crown from which protrude long peacock's feathers. A tiny matshed seaside shrine at Port Dickson, also on the west coast of Malaysia, contains a small composite image of the youths, most certainly wrestling, one grasping the other by his queue and an arm.
In a temple in Singapore the keeper was adamant that the two youths only spoke Hindi and that many of the devotees in his temple praying before them were Singaporean Indians who regularly consulted the Hokkien [Fujian] spirit medium in the temple. In every day life the medium only spoke Hokkien and therefore had to work through a spirit interpreter. The Indian devotees, he added, could only understand their mother tongue, Tamil, one of the Dravidian languages of southern India and who seemed to be able to converse with the deities through the medium without any trouble 'as the medium in his trance spoke Tamil'.
In one temple in Fujian recently a local Chinese explained that they were homosexuals presumably a guess inspired by their pose. However, you can imagine our reaction when in a village temple in Kaohsiung county in southern Taiwan we saw what appeared to be the standard image of the pair, swathed as usual in silken robes donated by devotees, being “undressed" by the leering temple custodian to reveal that the dark skinned youth was holding the white skinned by the forearm and his queue whilst the white skinned youth had one arm around the shoulder of the black skinned one, but was holding the black skinned youth's penis with the other hand. The custodian fell about when he saw how disconcerted we were. The village elders left their card playing on the temple veranda to join in the general laughter which encouraged village children to rush in to see what was happening. They were chased out but not before several had managed to see the image and were unable to get out fast enough to tell the others what they had seen. The custodian explained that someone had ordered the image to be carved this way some years ago, possibly as a joke, and very few devotees