The City God with General Fan, Singapore - Chinese Deities 4 (GIF)

There is a City God temple in every major administrative center in the Chinese diaspora. Ranked above the local earth god Tudigong, his job is to keep the city safe, and to watch over its inhabitants. He has both civil and military assistants to undertake the necessary bureaucracy of keeping track of all birth and deaths and all meritorious and evil deeds committed within his spiritual domain. Each City God is the soul of a meritorious human who was promoted to this exalted rank after death. There are four City God temples that I am aware of in Taipei, Taiwan; three in Singapore, and three in Kuala Lumpur. The numbers can be accounted for as each city has grown in size since they were founded. Originally known as the God of Walls and Moats, City Gods have been popular since the Tang Dynasty which began in the 7th century AD. This City God belongs to a temple in Jurong East, an industrial suburb of Singapore, a temple which features in chapters 4 and 6 of my monograph 'Voices from the Underworld' which was published by Manchester University Press in 2020. The photograph was shot when the deity was taken out of the temple for an annual night time ritual to honor the ancestors. Piles of joss money were being burned as ancestral offerings immediately behind his temporary altar producing this dramatic effect.