The Nine Emperor Gods Festival through the Lens of Modernity
The Festival is celebrated on the first day of the ninth month in the lunar calendar
Celebrated during the ninth lunar month of the Chinese calendar, the Nine Emperor Gods Festival is commemorated by the Taoist community over a nine-day period of festivities and rituals. There are various stories behind the arrival of the Nine Emperor Gods festival in Singapore. However, it is largely believed that a man named Ong Choo Kee, who possessed a religious artefact representing the Nine Emperor Gods, built a temple in Singapore to commemorate the success endowed upon him by the gods. While the rituals differ across countries and temples, in Singapore devotees gather at designated temples to ceremoniously transport palanquins of the nine deities to nearby beaches to perform rites at the shore.
In 2014, Associate Professor Alvin Eng Hui Lim (NUS Department of English Language and Literature) attended the festival at Choa Chu Kang Dou Mu Gong temple to observe the modern practices and adaptions of these traditions. His article ‘Between the sea and the shore: mediating the Nine Emperor Gods Festival in Singapore’ (Journal of Contemporary Religion, 2019) takes a look at the interactions of state and technology with religion, through the lens of the Nine Emperor Gods Festival.
In a country with limited land, sacred spaces are sometimes relocated or lost due to the state’s intervention, which forces worshippers to adjust to these new conditions. For the Nine Emperor Gods Festival, devotees must reconfigure the boundaries of sacred areas by tapping into technological resources to complete the rites. This includes using buses to transport the deities to Singapore’s reclaimed coasts whilst navigating through the cityscape. Technology further encroaches into religion through cameras and smartphones that archive rituals and share them across social media platforms. Using bright LED lights increases the performative value of these processions, enhancing the sacred experience through different technological mediums. With the inclusion of technology, various tools, and changing spaces, the syncretic nature of religion in Singapore becomes more apparent as religion finds itself negotiating with modern circumstances.
The Nine Emperor Gods Festival
The Nine Emperor Gods Festival (九皇爷诞) is an important religious event in the Chinese lunar calendar in Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand. Starting from around the end of the eighth lunar month to the ninth or tenth day of the ninth lunar month, the Nine Emperor Gods Festival lasts for at least nine to ten days and involves a personal regime of abstinence for the devotees and practitioners alike. The scale and duration of the Nine Emperor Gods festival in Singapore is different from other Chinese deity festivals in Singapore and other parts of Southeast Asia, but also differs from the same festival in China.
While some believe the festival to have its roots in ancient Chinese cosmology and religion, centering on the propitiation of the Northern Dipper in Taoism and Buddhism for longevity and salvation from disasters and misfortune, there are other stories in Singapore and Southeast Asia about the origins of the Nine Emperor Gods and who they are (or who he is), which reflect the historical experiences of the Chinese in Southern China and Southeast Asia. Some describe the gods as being pirates who robbed the rich to give to the poor. Some believe that they are Ming loyalists, while others believe the Nine Emperor Gods to be the last Ming Emperor as well as Zheng Chenggong, a pirate leader during the late Ming dynasty and opponent of the new Qing government in China in the mid-seventeenth century.
Gods Festival each year. They are located across the island. The two oldest temples hosting the celebrations, being more than a hundred years old, are the Hougang Dou Mu Gong (Tou Mu Kung) (后港斗母宫) and the Feng Shan Gong (Hong San Keong) (凤山宫) respectively. The others, include Choa Chu Kang Dou Mu Gong (蔡厝港斗母宫), Jing Shui Gang Dou Mu Gong (汫水港斗母宫) , Kim San Tze (金山寺), Jiu Huang Gong (九皇宫), Jiu Huang Dian (九皇殿), Long Nan Dian (龙南殿), Long Nan Si (龙南寺), Long Shan Yan Dou Mu Gong (龙山岩斗母宫), Nan Shan Hai (南山海), Temple, Shen Xian Gong (神仙宫), Xuan Wu Shan (玄武山), Yu Hai Tang Guan Yin Tang (玉海棠观音堂), Yu Huang Gong (玉皇宫), and Zhun Ti Tang (准提堂). In more recent years, there have been new organisations or temples holding the Nine Emperor Gods festival, such as Nan Bei Dou Mu Gong (南北斗母宫) and Yu Huang Gong (玉皇宫) respectively.
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