ABSTRACT
If Chinese spirit-medium cults have received little attention by either western or Chinese scholars, it is partly due to the fact that the religions of China have received far more extensive treatment as systems of thought than as practical expressions of popular belief. Singapore is, in fact, a place which, after 130 years of growth, has still to develop a culture it can call its own. There is reason to believe that the earliest settlers had mostly taken Malay or Indian wives, and even by the end of the last century it was not a common practice to bring wives from China. It is difficult to assess the prevalence of spirit mediumship in China. Nevertheless, the tolerance of religious practices as such means that spirit mediumship has been able to survive and develop in Malaya more freely than most Chinese institutions, and a great deal more freely than in China where it has been subjected to sporadic persecution.
