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obvious to any Chinese with an ounce of nous. Two years later he wrote a play, Hai Rui Dismissed, purporting to be about Hai Rui. This was seen as a covert attack on Mao Zedong's purge of Marshal Peng Dehuai who had openly blamed Mao for the 1959 famine. The purge of the Peking hierarchy led by Yao Wenyuan, a Communist political writer in 1965 [who was later one of the Gang of Four], is usually seen as the overture to the Cultural Revolution in China, Hai Rui being used as a symbol for Peng Dehuai, Mao's fallen rival.

In a Hainanese community temple dedicated to the Jade Emperor near Bukit Mertajam in northern Malaysia two images flanked the main deity, on his left hand his Fourth Daughter and on his right Luo Yanhua, about whom nothing more is known other than she is claimed to be a unique Hainanese deity. Her image has not been seen or recorded anywhere else, hand, and aide to the Fourth Daughter.

Although Lishan Laomu is primarily a Chaozhou local folk religion cult goddess she is also worshipped widely in Hainanese temples where she is regarded as a Hainanese cult. Lishan Laomu is her more popular title rather than Lishan Shengmu, though considering the ambiguities in legend, title and the initial character, it is open to question whether we might have more than one deity here. Three different characters for Li, all homophones, have been noted. The first means black, the second pear, and the third black horse. The first is the more popular version in central Malaysia and Hong Kong. The second appears to be the character preferred by the Hainanese, and the third has only been encountered in Taiwanese temples. She was referred to in a Saigon Hainanese temple as either Yimei Niangniang 懿美娘娘 or Yide Niangniang 懿德娘娘.

An elderly lady temple keeper in Kowloon approached the deity and "introduced" me to Lishan Shengmu as ‘a foreigner who wished to disperse the mists of his ignorance.' She told me that Miss Fan, a Daoist nun, had been summoned by Tian Hou to Heaven to be trained to become an Immortal and is now a caring spirit known as Lishan Shengmu, the Saintly Mother [or Matron] Lishan.

In an interesting but typical misconception an odd title of a deity was noted in a temple in Lincoln Road in Singapore where the custodian who claimed to be Hainanese also claimed that all the deities were
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uniquely Hainanese. In practice of the seventeen only one was Hainanese and that bore the odd title. It was Li San Shengmu, literally the Saintly Mother Li the third. This is obviously Li Shan, misheard with the 'san' assumed to be the 'Third'.

The most widespread claim is that Lishan Shengmu or Lishan Laomu24 was a ferocious lady general of the Tang dynasty known for her love of fighting, and is now a popular character in Chaozhou plays. However, to many Chinese she is better known by the maiden name of Fan Li-shan as merely the wife and mother of two famous generals, Xue. Several stories told about her contain in addition to common factors, others involving unconnected genuine historical heroes, some from entirely different eras. The composite story of the best known legends about Miss Fan25 begins with her warrior father giving her a 'sword to execute Immortals' and a 'whip to beat the spirits' and after she had completed her military training and prior to her going off to help General Xue Dingshan26 to pacify the west. In one version she joined up with him, served and fought alongside winning his trust and favour. In another Xue met and fought her on the battlefield. She defeated him but, because he was a handsome general, and with a bit of persuasion, she married him. A photocopied broadsheet distributed by the temple keeper in a small immigrant settlement shrine above Kowloon claimed that the Lishan cult had been popular in central China, and that her story, described in the 'Conquest of the West,' ostensibly written by Xue Dingshan himself, explained that she had been the wife of Xue, later transformed into an Immortal as a reward for her miracles and achievements.

There is also a Lishan Laomu who is also a definitive goddess appearing in the great novel The Journey to the West, the story of the fantastic journey made by Xuanzang, together with Sun, the Monkey, Sha the monk and Pigsy. In part of the story it appears likely that Lishan was Monkey's elder sister, a courtesy title rather than a blood relationship. She, together with her three daughters, all Bodhisattvas, named Truth, Love and Pity, transformed themselves into beautiful women in order to tempt the Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang and his entourage of Monkey, Pigsy and Sha with their beauty. She changed herself into a widow and proposed to Xuanzang who rejected her. She and her daughters teased Pigsy, who after many adventures found that they were merely figments of his imagination. This goddess would
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21 This is present day Maoming in western Guangdong province, not too far from the Liaozhou peninsula leading down to Hainan.

22 A city in south eastern Guangdong province, half way between the Liaozhou peninsula and the Pearl River.

23 Note that there are two different deities, Longwei Shenggong worshipped by the Hainanese and Longwei Shengwang worshipped by the Chaozhou people. The latter is, to all intents and purposes, a local Earth God.

24

25 Laomu, Old Mother [or Elderly Matron], is a title often mentioned in popular stories. In Xue Dingshan's Campaign to the West Laomu was Fan Lihua's teacher who, in eight years, taught her the art of moving mountains and raising armies from a handful of beans.

An elderly Chaozhou man in a Kowloon temple confided that Lishan [‘Fan Lihua' he called her] is a fictional character to support the story of the two generals Xue, and that much of their legends have little or no historical basis.

26 Xue Dingshan's father, Xue Rengui, also a general, was an early Tang hero who not only also led an expedition to the west, he also served in the Korean campaign of Tang Tai Cong. Xue Dingshan, otherwise known as Xue Gang, is claimed to have saved the life of his emperor and is now a Fukienese cult deity, the face of whose image is characterised by extraordinary and colourful decorations.

27 William Mesny relates that recumbent iron images of oxen were believed to be a protection from floods when these images were placed along the banks of river courses and lakes likely to overflow. He noticed several along the banks of the Grand Canal in 1874 and was told that they had been placed there by Liu Bowen Mesny's Chinese Miscellany: Vol. IV: Shanghai: 11 February 1905.

28 As in Taipan, the Senior Boss.

29 The shrine and its images disappeared, doubtless into a high rise flat, though it could have gone the way of so many minor cults and disappeared due, perhaps, to the aged temple keeper's demise.
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