Temples held a special significance for the Chinese community in the past. Temples were usually the heart of the kampong, where they played diverse and vital social roles. This project explores the history of Kampongs through in-depth investigations of Singapore Chinese Temples. It will explore how the study of surviving Chinese temples that had their origins in the kampong can evoke a broader history of kampongs. This project reconstructs Kampong heritage through locating and documenting the evolution of this set of Chinese Temples in Singapore.

This project does not approach kampong history from a top-down macro-national discourse, nor from individual scattered memories and emotional nostalgia. Instead, it selects the Chinese temples which played central roles in Kampongs as a site from which to approach Kampong life and history and to rediscover kampongs as essential players in the development of Singapore’s economy from the ground up.

The proposed project attempts to cut through both nostalgic discourse and its debunking (Chua, 2015) in order to rethink and reinterpret kampongs as essential players in Singapore’s economic development. In addition, inter-ethnic, inter-cultural, and inter-religious interactions can also be discovered in kampongs and temples. The diversity of kampong culture and the mingling of different races will be uncovered in this study.

PI & Co-PI: Kenneth Dean & Wu Qi  
NUS Team: Lin Ruo & Hong Xincheng

Funding Agency: National Heritage Board Heritage Research Grant
Project Duration: 31 January 2023 – 31 December 2024