Historiography of the Nine Emperor Gods Festival and Worship

Despite its popularity across the Chinese diaspora, the Nine Emperor Gods Festival has received limited historically grounded, multi-sited analysis. Existing scholarship divides along four broad tendencies, shaped by distinct academic contexts, source orientations, and theoretical blind spots. The earliest accounts emerged from an ethnographic impulse to catalogue ritual structure and trace diasporic continuity. Harada Masumi’s 1979 study of Ampang Lam Thian Kiong (安邦南天宮), followed by Ruth-Inge Heinze’s fieldwork in Singapore and Cheu Hock Tong’s dissertation on spirit-mediumship and divination, framed the festival as a consistent expression of Chinese religious tradition abroad.Footnote ¹⁰ While foundational, these works rested on an implicit Sinocentric model: Southeast Asian practice was read as derivative of a civilizational core, with little attention to rupture, improvisation, or local reconfiguration.

In the early 2000s, a second strand developed among scholars in Southeast Asia who approached temples as institutions embedded in postcolonial regimes. Emphasizing state regulation and religious tourism, these studies foreground institutional adaptation but often sideline ritual transformation.Footnote ¹¹ Grounded in micro-history and shaped by nation-state imaginaries, they do not interrogate how cosmologies, deities, or ritual grammars evolve under pressure. A parallel body of scholarship examines the festival’s role in identity formation. In Penang, large-scale ritual organization has been linked to Chinese ethnic resilience amid communal tension, while in Thailand—particularly Phuket—the festival, closely equated with Chinese religious practice, has turned self-mortification into a tourist spectacle.Footnote ¹² Such studies, however, often treat “Chinese-ness” as a stable category, rather than one continually shaped by, and implicated in shaping, ritual, politics, and regional dynamics.

Concurrently, Sinophone researchers have prioritized Daoist and Buddhist canonical traditions to reconstruct the festival’s religious lineage. Mainland Chinese scholars tend to emphasize its diffusion and connective networks, tracing its transmission through transregional migration, extracanonical scriptures, and related variables.Footnote ¹³ Taiwanese scholars, by contrast, often identify the Nine Emperors with the astral deities of the Northern Dipper.Footnote ¹⁴ Though rich in detail, both perspectives tend to reduce Southeast Asian ritual creativity to textual or historical deviation, privileging a Sinocentric baseline as normative and sidelining local reinvention.Footnote ¹⁵

A fourth body of work—led by Malaysian Chinese fieldworkers—foregrounds contested origin myths and localized ritual memory. Researchers such as Li Qingnian, Lee Eng Kew, and Ong Seng Huat reject Dipper-centered genealogies, instead recovering narratives that link the festival to Ming loyalists and fraternal organizations.Footnote ¹⁶ Drawing on oral histories, temple ephemera, and ethnographic observation, they recast the Nine Emperor Gods not as exported icons but as Southeast Asian conceptions shaped by specific historical conjunctures.

These categories are not discrete, and scholars frequently draw across methods. Ong Seng Huat attempted to integrate textual sources with fieldwork, but his scattershot approach to triangulating fragmented temporal and spatial materials undermines analytical coherence.Footnote ¹⁷ Lee Fong-Mao extended this comparative logic, juxtaposing ship-burning rites in Wangye (王爺) worship and the Nine Emperor Gods Festival to trace diasporic religious exchange.Footnote ¹⁸ Lee, however, relies too heavily on parallels with the Wangye tradition, framing the Nine Emperors through a pre-existing ritual idiom without precise evidence on how the broader festival apparatus has changed in Southeast Asia. Still, these studies affirm that the Nine Emperor Gods Festival remains a site of active negotiation, shaped by shifting ritual economies, political constraints, and religious innovation.

Few studies treat the heterogeneity of the Nine Emperor Gods as an evolving process rather than a static fact. These transformations reflect a “punctuated evolution,” in which some elements remain stable while others fragment, elaborate, or simplify.Footnote ¹⁹ Studies of Chinese religious change consistently show that reinterpretation and localization are central to the development of deity cults. James Watson’s standardization thesis illustrates this: even Tian Hou, a state-canonized goddess, retained appeal across diverse social and regional contexts. “[T]he state imposed a structure but not the content,” privileging “symbols over beliefs” and allowing varied impressions to persist beneath formal uniformity.Footnote ²⁰

Building on this, Prasenjit Duara’s notion of “superscribing symbols” shows how newer meanings in Guan Di’s worship layer onto older ones like a palimpsest.Footnote ²¹ Paul Katz extends this with “reverberation,” demonstrating how the veneration of Marshal Wen was reshaped through religious specialists, canonizations, and especially literature and dramatic ritual. These expressions were not top-down impositions but drew from a shared reservoir of symbols and contested ideologies.Footnote ²²

These frameworks provide an important scaffold for theorizing the Nine Emperor Gods’ shifting identities across time and space—not through linear continuity but through constantly negotiated narrative traditions. However, a key variable in late imperial Chinese religion—the role of the state in shaping religious life—is largely absent, due to both geographical distance and the colonial context. While colonial governments remained in place, their intervention in Chinese religious affairs was minimal.Footnote ²³ This autonomy allowed region-specific myths and ritual systems to flourish. The festival’s historical entanglement with fraternal societies reflects a diasporic mentalité oriented toward an imagined East Asian core—a center simultaneously invoked and rejected.

The Nine Emperor Gods Festival stages this tension through myth and ritual, framing China as both origin and obstacle. Many myths of the Nine Emperor Gods cast antagonists as tyrants, Manchu oppressors, or ambiguous figures like Zheng Chenggong (鄭成功, 1624–1662)—at once defending and betraying imperial legitimacy. Displacement, then, becomes not simply a historical outcome but a moral imperative: a condition rooted in, yet distanced from, an imagined China. This study approaches the Nine Emperor Gods Festival not as a relic of Chinese tradition but as a ritual system reshaped by migration, political change, and transregional networks. While core observances endured, new mythologies, patronage forms, and ritual logics emerged—transformations central to the festival’s diasporic trajectory.

Rulers and Stars: Interpretations of Jiuhuang in Early Chinese Texts

Early references to Jiuhuang (九皇) reveal a longstanding ambiguity between the singular “Ninth Emperor” and the plural “Nine Emperors”—a semantic “slippage” that, as Andrew Kipnis observes, carries “important philosophical, social, and political implications.”Footnote ²⁴ This fluidity continues to shape the Nine Emperor Gods’ composite identity and variable membership. In the Pheasant Cap Master (鶡冠子, ca. 3rd century BCE), Jiuhuang appears as a vague collective of rulers.Footnote ²⁵ Dong Zhongshu’s (179–104 BCE) Luxuriant Dew of the Spring and Autumn Annals (春秋繁露) reinterprets the term as both elevation and decline: “Shennong is designated as the Ninth Emperor” (推神農以為九皇), but elsewhere Jiuhuang marks the lowest rung of “demotion” (绌). Beyond its function as a noun or status marker, Jiuhuang also operates adjectivally, as in “the position of the Nine Emperors” (九皇之位), where it denotes a hierarchical role.Footnote ²⁶

The term Jiuhuang resurfaced in the sixth century CE as a designation for a group of deities in the Chart of the Nine Emperors (九皇圖) in the DZ640 Wondrous Scripture of the Eight Emperors (洞神八帝妙精經). This chart lists nine divine figures employed in visualization practices, embedding them within the practitioner’s body as part of religious cultivation.Footnote ²⁷ The final triad features Fuxi, Nuwa, and Shennong—depicted as having “a cow’s face and human body” (牛面人身)—a portrayal that likely echoes his appearance in Dong Zhongshu’s earlier work.Footnote ²⁸ By the Tang dynasty (618–907), the Nine Emperors were explicitly identified with the Northern Dipper (北斗九星), whose stars were personified with names, consorts, and celestial palaces in Supreme Clarity Daoism (上清). While the Chart of the Nine Emperors provided a different divine roster, its ritual methods closely resembled Supreme Clarity practices. For example, the Initial Tier of Heavenly Emperors (初天皇) in the Chart of the Nine Emperors—officials bearing tablets—resembled anthropomorphized Dipper stars in the DZ1396 Supreme Clarity River Chart Talisman Register (上清河圖寶籙).Footnote ²⁹ This convergence suggests an ongoing cosmological shift—from mythic sovereigns to stellar rulers—conditioned by Tang-era engagements with astronomy, visualization, and ritual governance.Footnote ³⁰

As Daoist traditions diversified, so too did cosmological interpretations of the Nine Emperors. Although they were often identified with the anthropomorphized stars of the Northern Dipper, their composition remained fluid. As Ong Seng Huat has argued, no universally accepted model of the Nine Emperors existed, and their identities varied across sources.Footnote ³¹ The DZ1032 Seven Satchels of the Hidden Clouds (雲笈七簽), compiled during the reign of Emperor Zhenzong of the Northern Song (1017–1021), describes the Dipper as the “divine seats of the Nine Emperors” (九皇之神席天尊之偃房), yet elsewhere presents a singular Dipper Sovereign with a personal biography: “Surname Chen, name Feng, courtesy Baiwan, from Jiangxia” (姓陳名奉字百萬江夏人).Footnote ³² Such contradictions illustrate how Daoist cosmology accommodated overlapping frameworks, reinforcing the Nine Emperors’ ontological flexibility even as they became increasingly celestialized.

By the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368), the association of the Nine Emperors with the Northern Dipper persisted but underwent further reconfiguration. This period saw the growing prominence of the Hindu-Buddhist goddess Molizhitian (摩利支天) as the Dipper Matriarch, likely reflecting attempts to reconcile Daoist and Buddhist traditions at the Mongol court.Footnote ³³ A Daoist reinterpretation had already appeared in the Southern Song (1127–1279) in the DZ621 Heart Scripture for Life Prolongation by the Most High Mysterious Numinous Doumu (太上玄靈斗姆大聖元君本命延生心經), where Doumu birthed nine golden lotus buds after undergoing inner alchemical refinement in a lotus pond (華池)—buds that ascended and became the “Daoist bodies of the Nine Emperors” (九皇道体).Footnote ³⁴ Her role expanded further in DZ1220 Collected Essentials of Daoist Methods (道法会元), compiled between the Yuan and early Ming dynasties, where she is invoked in Thunder Magic (雷法) rituals alongside her sons, the Nine Emperors of the Northern Dipper.Footnote ³⁵ These increasing references to Doumu’s power underscore her growing acceptance and popularity across Daoist traditions, as practitioners sought her intercession and divine protection across an expanding range of esoteric practices.

Late Qing and Republican References to the Nine Emperors

The prominence of Doumu, whose identity, titles, and veneration increasingly overlapped with those of the Nine Emperors, persisted into the late Qing dynasty (1644–1911) and beyond. As one of the most widely revered “divine saviors” in Chinese religious culture, Doumu’s following flourished during a period marked by heightened anxieties over moral decay and cosmic decline.Footnote ³⁶ Her significance was evident in the extracanonical entries in the Essentials of the Daoist Canon (重刋道藏輯要), compiled by Jiang Yuanting (蔣元庭) in the early nineteenth century. In the Scripture of Doumu and the Nine Emperors (斗母元尊九皇眞經), found within the JY 237 Collected Works of Master Zhang Sanfeng (張三丰先生全集), Doumu is portrayed as dispatching Zhang Sanfeng to the mortal realm and appointing him as her messenger to transmit her teachings for the salvation of humanity.Footnote ³⁷ Similarly, in the JY 101 True Scripture of the Nine Emperors and Doumu on Abstaining from Killing and Prolonging Life (九皇斗姥戒殺延生真經), she outlines a soteriological agenda urging devotees to avoid killing animals—particularly the slaughter of cows and dogs.Footnote ³⁸

This association is further reflected in temple inscriptions, where Doumu and the Nine Emperors were often invoked interchangeably. At the Baiyun Guan (白雲觀) in Beijing, an 1834 stele by the Nine Emperors Association (九皇會) is dominated by references to Doumu, while a 1783 stele at Sanyuan Gong (三元宮) in Guangzhou notes that crowds attending the Nine Emperors Festival (九皇聖誕) overwhelmed the temple, forcing worship outdoors.Footnote ³⁹ This institutional embrace extended into the imperial court. Doumu’s veneration at the Qin’an Dian (欽安殿) was promoted by Lou Jinyuan (樓近垣, 1689–1776), who introduced her worship to the Yongzheng Emperor (雍正帝, r. 1722–1735) through the establishment of Dipper Altars (斗壇).Footnote ⁴⁰ Although later curtailed, vegetarian fasting endured, as Yu Rongling (裕容齡, 1889–1973) recalled in her memoirs. Even Empress Dowager Cixi (慈禧太后, 1835–1908) observed the fast—though she reportedly complained about the food’s lack of flavor.Footnote ⁴¹

Concurrently, communal forms of devotion developed beyond the temple and palace. The proliferation of Dipper Assemblies (斗會) in Qing China similarly played a crucial role in the community-based rise of Nine Emperors and Doumu worship beyond formal temple institutions and state-sanctioned rituals. Locally coordinated and led by lay ritual specialists, their organizational structure anticipates many comparable forms later seen in the vernacular religious landscape of Southeast Asia.Footnote ⁴² In Beijing, Pan Rongbi (潘荣陛, fl. eighteenth century) recorded that lay devotees observed vegetarianism from the end of the eighth lunar month until the Double Ninth Festival—a period increasingly recognized as Doumu’s birthday.Footnote ⁴³ In Hangzhou, Fan Zushu (范祖述, fl. Qing) described families erecting suburban “Nine Emperors Dipper Altars” (九皇鬥壇) in competitive displays of devotion from the first to tenth days of the ninth lunar month.Footnote ⁴⁴ In Sichuan, missionary James Hutson (1832–1905) documented the widespread recitation of Nine Emperors scriptures, with vegetarian-only premises displaying ritual flags—practices later corroborated by newspaper reports after World War II (1942–1945).Footnote ⁴⁵

The late imperial and Republican periods also saw a specific occupational group closely associated with the Nine Emperors Festival: professional performers collectively known as the Liyuan (梨園).Footnote ⁴⁶ Among most troupes, a temporary altar—restricted to the troupe’s ritual specialists, who were also performers—would be raised and maintained throughout the festival. The precise reasons for this affiliation remain unclear, though by 1946, it was an established expectation that those who “used their voice to make a living” (吃開口飯) would observe the festival.Footnote ⁴⁷ These altars, typically adorned in yellow, were prominent in entertainment hubs such as Shanghai.Footnote ⁴⁸ In Beijing, the Yanjing Liyuan Association maintained a permanent altar for an image of the Ninth Emperor, described as having “three heads, six arms, covered in fur, and palms resembling those of a beast” (三頭六臂被毛帶掌形類獸). Since 1924, the image had been enshrined out of public sight within the Inner Hall of the Nine Emperors Association (九皇會內堂), emerging only during the festival.Footnote ⁴⁹

This survey highlights key patterns in the historical development of the Nine Emperors and Doumu’s worship in China. First, despite its popularity from the late Qing period onward, the festival does not appear to have been organized around any stable, authoritative scriptural or liturgical corpus. Post hoc attempts to link its Southeast Asian ritual structure to Daoist scriptures are often tenuous. Temples and field researchers have assumed an equivalence between the Nine Emperors and the Northern Dipper, selectively and eclectically incorporating elements of the latter’s scriptures to explain contemporary festival practices, even though the terms “Nine Emperors” or “Ninth Emperor” never appeared. Notably, the suffix “Dadi” (大帝) never appeared in East Asian sources before the twenty-first century, suggesting that the festival’s textual basis is a later construction rather than an early canonical tradition.

Second, the Nine Emperors have many identities and associated accounts in China. Despite the widespread veneration of the Nine Emperors, miscellaneous jottings and journalistic accounts never elaborated on their identities.Footnote ⁵⁰ Present-day ethnographies in Jiangxi variously associate them with the Northern Dipper, a filial child who was executed, and Zhang Guolao’s nine sons who were wrongfully killed.Footnote ⁵¹ Whether these narratives originated in China or were later reimported back to China from Southeast Asia—considering their tropological overlaps with similar accounts circulating abroad—remains uncertain. At least one case, however, indicates that this may be a possibility: the reintroduction of the festival to Zhangpu, Fujian, by Malaysian Chinese returnees.Footnote ⁵²

Third, the festival’s observance in China was marked by regional diversity, with no single representation of the Nine Emperors.Footnote ⁵³ Even within the Liyuan, their traditions were different, identities were never explicitly defined, and representations varied significantly. In the Yanjing Liyuan Association, the Nine Emperor God was permanently venerated in a secret room as a multi-armed, bear-clawed figure—one of many interpretations across the Liyuan. Elsewhere, Beijing performer Li Hongchun (李洪春, 1898–1991) described the deity as “a Daoist-crowned, Daoist-robed, ruyi-holding, long-bearded old man” (是個頭戴道冠, 身穿道衣, 手抱如意的長須老人). Rather than a permanent image, a papier-mâché effigy was venerated and incinerated at the festival’s conclusion.Footnote ⁵⁴

Finally, the festival’s variability in China reflects the absence of a fixed ritual structure. Although early references visualized the deities as bearers of apotropaic power, no single liturgy or standardized framework appears to have governed its observance. Instead, practices varied widely across regions. By the late imperial period, however, vegetarianism in honor of the Nine Emperors and Doumu had emerged as one of the few consistent elements. As the festival spread to Southeast Asia, it evolved from a fluid, locally adapted observance into a more unified ritual system. Migration, historical memory, and fraternal societies shaped this transformation, standardizing key rites and embedding the festival within overseas Chinese communities.

The Nine Emperor Gods Festival in Southeast Asia

The Nine Emperor Gods Festival took root in Southeast Asia during the nineteenth century, shaped by Chinese migration, global economic expansion, and fraternal society networks. This maritime “‘corridor’” linking China and Southeast Asia—“a cultural space that transmits people, wealth, and information in both directions”—was central to the institutionalization of such organizations and, as we shall see, to the introduction of the festival from China.Footnote ⁵⁵ In the absence of state or clan support, fraternal societies—male-dominated groupings that proliferated throughout late imperial China—provided mutual aid, labor control, and governance for migrants operating outside kinship and state structures. Over time, these societies came to dominate economic interests, structure community life, and regulate commerce across the region, embedding the festival within Southeast Asia’s evolving social and religious landscape.Footnote ⁵⁶

As British colonial rule expanded across the Straits Settlements—Penang (1786), Malacca (1824), and Singapore (1819)—fraternal organizations integrated themselves into trade and labor migration networks. By the mid-nineteenth century, rising global demand for tin—driven by European and American industrialization—coupled with British tariff reductions, accelerated tin extraction and large-scale Chinese migration from Fujian and Guangdong.Footnote ⁵⁷ Acting as intermediaries, fraternal societies controlled labor recruitment, trade, and local governance, further entrenching their influence over migrant networks.

One of the most influential was the Kian Teik Tong (建德堂), founded in Penang in 1844 and later extending into Phuket. Led by five major surname families, it controlled Chinese commerce—from Burmese rice imports to Phuket tin mining—integrating both regions into global trade networks. As Penang emerged as a major Chinese labor distribution center at the northern end of the Straits of Melaka, it supplied workers to southern Siam and Perak. Tin extracted in Phuket by Chinese laborers was shipped to Penang for refinement and export, reinforcing regional economic ties. Southern Siam, similarly, remained a loosely governed frontier where Fujianese fraternal societies and businessmen dominated migration, labor, and community affairs.Footnote ⁵⁸ Although the Nine Emperor Gods Festival was introduced independently, its development was nonetheless shaped by the cultural and political dominance of these associations in everyday community life.

The festival’s earliest foothold in Southeast Asia is traditionally linked to the Phuket Kathu Shrine’s (内杼斗母宮) version of events, which traces its origins to the 1820s, when a plague devastated the predominantly Fujianese mining community. Miners recovered after observing vegetarian fasting on the advice of a visiting opera troupe, which left behind three deity images—including one of Marshal Tiandu (田都元帥)—the patron deity of opera performers, in the care of the local community.Footnote ⁵⁹ Originally centered around Romanee Street, the festival was relocated following a conflagration, leading to the establishment of three major temples in Phuket—Bang Niew, Kathu, and Jui Tui—all of which continue to venerate Marshal Tiandu as the main aide to the Nine Emperor Gods to this day.Footnote ⁶⁰

These developments occurred within the broader context of Penang’s economic and political influence, and the Kian Teik Tong’s expansion into Phuket, notably amid Siamese anxieties about increasing British influence from the northern Malay states. With limited direct control over these frontier regions, the Siamese state largely entrusted governance to the rising Fujianese mercantile elite, whose business and fraternal society networks dominated local affairs.Footnote ⁶¹ This autonomy entrenched the Ghee Hin (義興) and Kian Teik Tong in everyday life, regulating labor, managing disputes, and asserting control over Chinese migrant communities. From the 1850s, the Kian Teik Tong consolidated its dominance, described by Wong Yee Tuan as “the most powerful hui [association] in Phuket” on the eve of the 1876 riots.Footnote ⁶² This influence was rooted in the Tan and Ong families, who, as Wang Chongyang noted in 1965, not only controlled key tin-mining interests but also held high-ranking positions within the Phuket Kian Teik Tong. Their roles—as president, advisor, and wielders of red and black cudgels—illustrate how their authority was structured through fraternal society hierarchies, which both disciplined Chinese laborers and acted as an informal counterbalance to British encroachment in the region.Footnote ⁶³

Further illustrating the entanglement of fraternal societies with the festival’s history, the Hong Kong Street Tow Boh Keong (香港巷斗母宫)—Penang’s first temple dedicated to the Nine Emperor Gods—also shared a historical connection with the Kian Teik Tong. The Haicheng Khoo (邱) family caretakers, who share a surname and place of origin with one of the dominant factions within the society’s Big Five, play a key role in the temple’s leadership to this day. Oral histories trace the temple’s origins to incense ashes and scriptures venerating the Nine Emperors, entrusted to the Khoos by Fujianese sailors.Footnote ⁶⁴ According to a commemorative poster displayed in the temple, the festival was first observed in 1851, when a shrine was established at Blacksmith Street. By 1872 or 1876, the construction of the Tan Clan—another Big Five surname—ancestral hall necessitated the shrine’s relocation to the Kian Teik Tong’s headquarters on Armenian Street, demonstrating the society’s role in providing both physical space and institutional backing for the festival’s continuity. The temple took up permanent residence on Hong Kong Street in 1925.Footnote ⁶⁵

From the nineteenth century onward, Southeast Asia’s integration into global networks—labor migration, religious patronage, and economic expansion—laid the groundwork for the Nine Emperor Gods Festival’s spread across Malaya. Incense division (分香) played a key role in this expansion, as sacred objects or incense ashes from established temples were enshrined elsewhere, linking temples through shared ritual lineages. The festival’s strong presence in mining communities further accelerated its dissemination, as trade routes and migration brought both workers and their deities to new settlements.Footnote ⁶⁶

The Taiping Kor Boo Beow (古武廟) and the Ampang Lam Thian Kiong emerged as two of the most significant Nine Emperor Gods temples in western Malaya, closely paralleling the rise of tin mining and the growth of these towns as labor centers. The Taiping temple traces its origins to Wang Yiyu (王奕鱼), who brought incense ashes from Phuket’s Kathu Shrine in either 1880 or as early as 1850. As tin extraction intensified, so did Chinese migration into the region—particularly of miners from Penang to Larut—alongside merchant elites who had begun capitalizing on the tin boom by the 1850s.Footnote ⁶⁷ Initially housed within Taiping’s Wang Clan Association, the temple’s early history shows how surname affiliations provided crucial institutional and material support for the festival’s foothold in a new setting. A temple established during the Guangxu period (1875–1908) permanently consolidated the Nine Emperor Gods’ presence in Taiping.Footnote ⁶⁸

Though Taiping was initially Perak’s principal tin-mining hub, Ipoh overtook it by the late nineteenth century, benefiting from richer deposits in the Kinta Valley and advancements in hydraulic mining and dredging. As capital and labor shifted to Ipoh, religious institutions followed suit.Footnote ⁶⁹ The transfer of Nine Emperor Gods worship from Taiping to Ipoh thus reflected broader economic transformations and illustrated how kinship networks facilitated religious expansion. Wang Yiyu’s cousin, Wang Yihou (王奕猴), later established another Nine Emperor Gods temple in Ipoh in 1896, embedding the cult in emerging centers of economic activity and labor migration in Malaya.Footnote ⁷⁰

Similarly, the establishment of the Ampang Lam Thian Kiong was directly tied to Kuala Lumpur’s emergence as a tin-mining center. In 1862, five years after Raja Abdullah of Klang initiated mining operations in Ampang, Lin An (林安) brought incense ashes from Phuket’s Kathu Shrine to the settlement. There, Lin—an employee at the tin mine—set up an altar in the miners’ dormitory and became the community’s first medium.Footnote ⁷¹ As with Taiping and Ipoh, the temple’s prominence coincided with soaring global demand for tin. Ore from Ampang was transported westward via Klang, while Kuala Lumpur emerged as the region’s administrative and commercial hub.Footnote ⁷² Throughout the twentieth century, the Lam Thian Kiong became a key node in popularizing Nine Emperor Gods worship, inspiring the founding of at least twelve temples in the region.Footnote ⁷³ This expansion reflects how ritual institutions evolved alongside economic shifts, reinforcing the interdependence of economic growth, migration, and religious transmission across the region.

Manifesting Tension: Myth, Ritual, and Diasporic Transformations

The spread of Nine Emperor Gods worship across Southeast Asia saw the institutionalization of a ritual system not found in China. While the nine-day vegetarian observance remained central, new markers emerged: devotees dressed in white, including mourning kerchiefs—a feature common within fraternal society initiations—and raised nine lamps to signal participation.Footnote ⁷⁴ Unlike many deity cults centered on divine images, the Nine Emperor Gods were often represented as written characters, enshrined behind a concealed altar known as the Inner Palace (内殿). As Adam Chau notes, Chinese deity festivals often follow a “hosting idiom,” where gods are received as “honored guest[s].”Footnote ⁷⁵ What sets this festival apart is its ritualized welcome and departure via water, with the gods manifesting and departing in the form of an incense censer—kept veiled inside the Inner Palace throughout the nine days.

Despite the widespread observance of the aforementioned ritual structure today, evidence of when its rituals were codified into a singular system remains scarce. No single textual source before Heinze’s ethnography captures the entire ritual system, but elements appear across different religious centers, suggesting that core practices were established before the Japanese Occupation of Southeast Asia (1941–1945). This scarcity is compounded by the limited circulation of written records among practitioners, leaving scholars to rely on early reports from the popular press. These sources—often shaped by Orientalist biases and dismissive of Chinese religiosity as “superstition” (迷信)—nonetheless offer glimpses into contemporary perceptions of the festival.Footnote ⁷⁶

The remainder of this article addresses two interrelated questions: how and why the festival’s ritual logic transformed in Southeast Asia, and why its structure has remained remarkably stable across the region. While previous scholarship has examined elements such as vegetarianism, white clothing, lamps, and incense censers within broader Chinese religious traditions, little attention has been paid to how these were reinterpreted and codified into a coherent ritual system in the diaspora.Footnote ⁷⁷

Understanding the festival’s transformation requires attending to the historical conditions of its expansion. Tin mining, migration, commerce, and fraternal societies undoubtedly spread Nine Emperor Gods worship across central Thailand, Sumatra, Myanmar, Malaya, and Singapore. Yet these forces alone do not explain the evolution of ritual or the emergence of new etiologies. Rather than simply preserving older traditions, the festival generated new meanings, adaptations, and spirit-medium revelations, embedding itself in Southeast Asia’s religious landscape. Economic and political upheaval did not merely relocate worshippers; it compelled ritual reformulations suited to new social and spatial realities.

Even as the festival spread beyond early centers like Phuket and Penang, it retained a remarkably consistent ritual structure. This coherence rests not only on shared rites but also on the proliferation of etiological myths that legitimize ritual practice by drawing on familiar tropes and sacred geographies. These myths ramify by locality rather than follow a linear sequence, making a thematic approach more productive than historical reconstruction. Suffused with imagery of death, mourning, liminality, and exile, they shape both the deities’ perceived nature and the rituals that venerate them. Annual observance re-enacts their violent erasure from history, reinforcing a cyclical pattern of disappearance and return. Positioned outside established pantheons, the Nine Emperor Gods blur categories—god, ancestor, ghost, gangster; sea and land; China and Southeast Asia—and are frequently identified as monks, pirates, rebels, or exiles.Footnote ⁷⁸ Their posthumous fate is ritually relived each year, as they are mourned, received, and reanimated through performance.

Many of these myths unfold within the Ming–Qing transition (1644–1683), a moment defined by rupture, violence, and loss, in which ritual practice transforms the past into an unresolved condition. The festival collapses distinctions between past and present, China and Southeast Asia, allowing participants to relive foundational moments of dislocation. In doing so, it reconfigures moral authority—not merely contrasting Chinese orthodoxy with diasporic heterodoxy but rejecting East Asian power structures and shifting legitimacy to Southeast Asian devotees. This orientation reflects not only a diasporic condition but a distinctively Southern Chinese outlook shaped by frontier insecurity, persecution, and historical ambivalence toward imperial China.Footnote ⁷⁹ Many myths refract this sensibility: exile becomes sacred, marginality becomes power, and “China” is remembered less as center than as a site of betrayal, violence, and departure.

This recurring cycle of erasure and return affirms the Nine Emperor Gods’ marginal status outside Confucian orthodoxy and state-sanctioned hierarchies—marginal from the perspective of elite and state-centered frameworks rather than from that of local devotees. Annually resurrected in funeral-like ceremonies, they are mourned, retrieved from the sea, and venerated as surrogate family members. Sangren reminds us that “such kin [ancestral spirits] cannot be wholly purified of yin, but as relatives [of the living] they do not belong in the pure yin category of forgotten ghosts.” Through ritual, the Nine Emperor Gods not only “mediate between yin and yang” but also between Southeast Asia as periphery and China as core, positioning memory and performance as central to diasporic identity and rendering what appears marginal in state discourse central within diasporic religious life.Footnote ⁸⁰

Themes, Tropes and Trauma: Nine Emperor Gods’ Myths in Historical Context

The theme of death and return is most vividly enacted in the festival’s ritual reception of the deities from a body of water. In most accounts, the sea serves as both an execution site and a locus of divine reappearance, reinforcing the Nine Emperor Gods’ perpetual state of exile and return. While the necessity of receiving the gods from the sea is rarely explicitly justified, myths clearly rationalize the practice. Nearly every account depicts the deities as figures violently erased from history—one of the southern Ming’s regents, Prince Lu (魯王, 1618–1662), whose drowned body returns as a floating incense censer, or Robin Hood-like pirates executed yet reappearing as drifting censers—only to resurface ritually. These stories do not merely commemorate exile; they ritually enact it, ensuring the deities remain eternally displaced yet never absent.

This motif resonates strongly with the symbolic landscape of fraternal society cosmology, in which water frequently serves as both boundary and conduit—initiatory spaces signifying symbolic death and rebirth. As Barend ter Haar notes, such groupings regularly framed rites of passage as metaphorical crossings over rivers or mountains, marking initiates’ rebirth.Footnote ⁸¹ The sea in the Nine Emperor Gods Festival similarly connects not only China to Southeast Asia but also the mundane world to mythological landscapes, particularly evoking the critical historical juncture of the Ming–Qing transition. The gods’ annual arrival and departure thus reenact exile as more than mere myth, articulating broader diasporic anxieties that frame displacement not as a temporary state but as a cyclical condition.

This cyclical return from the sea underscores the Nine Emperor Gods’ liminal existence—not only between life and death but also between presence and absence. Their aniconic form, aligning them more closely with ghosts than with fully enshrined deities, marks a departure from the standard practice of divine embodiment through images.Footnote ⁸² Unlike most Chinese deities, who are venerated through statues, the oldest Nine Emperor Gods temples—and many newer religious centers in Southeast Asia—depict them solely through written characters or a spirit tablet emblazoned with their name.

In a 1949 account published in the Nanyang Siang Pau, the Nine Emperor Gods refused statues made in their likeness after their beheading and subsequent canonization by Qin Shihuang. Since they “lacked heads” (没有頭顱), their temples could not display images in their likenesses.Footnote ⁸³ Later versions similarly describe them as the final Ming regents, executed by Qing forces, whose headlessness prevents their anthropomorphic representation.Footnote ⁸⁴ This persistent association is more than an idiosyncratic quirk; rather, it suggests a systemic recognition that their divinity and power derived specifically from the moment of their violent deaths, reinforcing their status as transgressive figures whose defining event remains taboo for representation.

More broadly, their veneration through spirit tablets mirrors Chinese mortuary rites, in which tablets signify the presence of the deceased, reinforcing their continued existence as figures in transition.Footnote ⁸⁵ Just as ancestral tablets represent the departed without fixing them in form, the Nine Emperor Gods’ aniconic representation allows devotees who receive them at waterways to act as surrogate mourners, forging fictive kinships over the course of the festival. Their identity is maintained not through embodied images but through inscription—a practice that echoes fraternal society traditions, in which names and titles evoke allegiance to absent patriarchs.Footnote ⁸⁶ In this sense, the Nine Emperor Gods are ritually displaced: their status as liminal beings—neither fully deified nor entirely absent—is enacted through the very form of their veneration, sustained by inscription and communal rites rather than visual presence.

The multiple meanings attached to the Nine Emperor Gods’ veneration as a spirit tablet illustrate the inherent instability of aniconism as a metaphor: it simultaneously recognizes and disavows their differences, enabling multiple, even contradictory, interpretations of their divine status. This symbolic ambiguity enhances their continuing relevance, simultaneously evoking ancestor worship, mourning rituals, and fraternal society rites.Footnote ⁸⁷ Their annual arrival from the sea does not restore order; rather, it reenacts their unresolved exile as they are taken in, concealed, and mourned by the communities who host them.

Setting aside these iconographic references, the Nine Emperor Gods Festival fundamentally encodes a tension in its mythology: the simultaneous invocation and rejection of China as a cultural and political center. Authorities are consistently portrayed as corrupt, incompetent, or oppressive, their failures leading to rebellion and their suppression efforts exposing their weaknesses. The festival’s enactment aligns itself with figures who suffer state persecution, suggesting that true moral authority lies beyond the imperial center. The 1949 account presents the Nine Emperor Gods as rebels against Qin Shihuang’s tyranny; frustrated by their defiance, he enlists a magician to behead them and abandon their bodies at sea, despite the righteousness of their cause.Footnote ⁸⁸ These stories do not merely recall past injustices but articulate a broader rejection of state power.

Kim Edwards, who interviewed a Mr. Foo in Kuantan, collected an account of the Nine Emperor Gods’ origin that reinforces this sentiment. The deities are portrayed as Robin Hood-like pirates executed by Chinese authorities, only to hint at their return as floating incense censers, reaffirming their bond with coastal communities that had benefited from their this-worldly deeds.Footnote ⁸⁹ This motif transforms exclusion into divine justice, in which those cast out by the state ritually reappear as figures of power.

While Edwards’ informant did not specify where this account is set, it resonates with Guangdong and Fujian—the regions from which most Southeast Asian migrants originated—both centers of immense trade wealth but also deep inequality. These regions were not only economically prosperous but also socially volatile, shaped by merchant wealth, piracy, and imperial suppression.Footnote ⁹⁰ Disenfranchised groups—outlaws, pirates, and fraternal society members—operated on the fringes, and the Nine Emperor Gods’ recurrent depiction as righteous rebels and “social bandits” provided a powerful idiom through which such marginality could be moralized rather than stigmatized.Footnote ⁹¹ Within fraternal associations—which constituted the institutional basis of early Chinese presence in Southeast Asia and functioned as parallel systems of protection, arbitration, and loyalty beyond imperial supervision—such figures sacralized alternative sovereignty within migrant society. This marginality and defiance may have made their legends especially compelling to Southeast Asian migrants, many of whom lived outside formal state structures, working in plantations, mines, or fraternal societies.

Considering the prevalence of fraternal societies in Southeast Asia—with their rhetoric of “Overthrowing the Qing and Restoring the Ming” (反清複明) as a means of building cohesion—it is unsurprising that the festival became a platform for reenacting the Ming–Qing transition. In these retellings, fraternal societies and Ming loyalists ritualized defiance through the festival, embedding anti-state ideologies in religious practice. By invoking deities who resisted imperial persecution, the festival does not merely recall their defiance—it reenacts it, sustaining an alternative vision of power beyond state control.

The Nine Emperor Gods’ persistent association with Southern China’s coast—where imperial control was weak and often contested—signifies more than historical geography. The Ampang Lam Thian Kiong’s 1992 account of the Nine Emperor Gods Festival presents the deities as Ming martyrs executed by the Qing, their severed heads drifting until fishermen in Putian, Fujian, horrified by their fates, “gathered to observe a grand funeral” (開喪大集會) in their honor. These funeral rites served as a cover for Ming loyalists, who used the secrecy of the Inner Palace to plot resistance.Footnote ⁹² Through their commemoration of the nine martyrs, devotees ritually “mourned for the nation,” transforming grief into a structured act of defiance that ensured their ignominious ends were not just remembered but perpetually reenacted.Footnote ⁹³

A 2001 account, also set during the Ming–Qing transition, reinforces this theme of concealment by identifying Zheng Chenggong as the Ninth Emperor. Wanted by the authorities, Zheng was received at the Fujian coast upon his arrival from Taiwan, evading Qing surveillance by being concealed and using the Inner Palace as a sanctuary to plot against the Qing. At the festival’s conclusion, he departed in the same manner—by a provisioned boat for his return to Taiwan.Footnote ⁹⁴ His reception, concealment, and departure mirror the festival’s core ritual sequence: the Ninth Emperor arrives by water, is hidden within the Inner Palace, and departs in secret—only to return again the following year.

This theme of anti-Qing subversion extends to narratives set in Southeast Asia, where temples and festival spaces were believed to provide cover for Ming loyalist activities. In these accounts, Ampang becomes the focal point, with the festival framed as a front for clandestine gatherings disguised as mourning rituals. One such account, documented by Cheu Hock Tong and retold throughout the 1980s, describes Ming loyalists from Hunan who fled to Ampang after their leader, Wan Yunlong (萬雲龍)—a semi-mythical figure prominent in fraternal society lore—was killed by Qing forces.Footnote ⁹⁵ Even in exile, they continued to recruit new members to fight the Manchus. When a colonial policeman raided one such initiation ceremony and questioned an attendant, he was misled into believing it was a religious ceremony—the attendant pointed to a censer, claiming it represented the Nine Emperor Gods.Footnote ⁹⁶ This act of deliberate misdirection mirrors the ritual concealment of the gods and reinforces their aniconic representation within the Inner Palace, ensuring they remain hidden yet ever-present.

Whatever their factual basis, these accounts resonate with actual episodes of exile—particularly the migration of Ming loyalists to Malacca and Vietnam following the collapse of the Southern Ming. Just as these loyalists sought refuge beyond Qing control, the Nine Emperor Gods Festival in Southeast Asia emerged as a ritual space where such rites could be enacted free from imperial and colonial scrutiny. Yet the festival’s absence in Malacca and Vietnam—despite the presence of Ming refugees and strong anti-Qing sentiment—suggests that its origins lie not in the seventeenth century but in later, post-eighteenth-century developments.Footnote ⁹⁷ This reveals the complex interplay between memory and history: while the festival evokes Ming loyalist flight, it was consolidated through the activities of fraternal societies that mobilized these memories to foster ideological cohesion abroad.

In these accounts, the festival’s ties to anti-Qing groups reframed it as a ritual of clandestine resistance: mourning the Nine Emperor Gods became inseparable from mourning the lost Ming world.Footnote ⁹⁸ These practices transformed religious devotion into a covert enactment of a rejected political order, sustaining a lineage of defiance beyond state control. The Inner Palace mirrored the secret halls of fraternal societies, offering an underground space for structured ritualized opposition. Crucially, in Southeast Asia—beyond Qing jurisdiction—the festival was not merely preserved but reinvented as a vehicle for ritual defiance, ensuring that the gods’ exile and return became an ongoing performance of political and religious autonomy.

Beyond resisting the Qing, these myths also confront fractures within Ming resistance itself. A 1979 account identifies the Ninth Emperor God as Prince Lu, who, seeking Zheng Chenggong’s support, was drowned at sea—not by the Qing, but by Zheng himself. Disillusioned by this betrayal, his followers fled to Southeast Asia, where they enshrined the prince as the Ninth Emperor.Footnote ⁹⁹ Betrayal thus comes not from a foreign occupier but from within the Ming cause, reinforcing the festival’s negotiation of a shifting “China”—whether Qing rule or the traitorous Zheng Chenggong. Prince Lu’s posthumous fate is ritually recalled annually, as his lost body re-emerges from the sea in the form of a censer.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ This annual retrieval evokes not just political loss but a recurring condition of exile—staged through repetition rather than resolved through closure. In reenacting the prince’s return, devotees engage their own histories, “remember[ing] the homeland’s past and sacraliz[ing] the new land, forming bridges between the two.” The censer, representing Prince Lu, thus “functions as a crossing place—a tirtha—between past and future.”Footnote ¹⁰¹

This logic of ritual exile extends beyond Prince Lu. Li Qingnian’s oral retellings depict the Ninth Emperor God as a Ming prince in hiding, operating under a pseudonym to evade Qing detection. A similar version persists in Singapore’s Shin Sen Keng temple, where temple leaders recount how the last Ming ruler fled abroad to marshal troops. In these narratives, survival depends not on visibility but on disappearance: concealment is not erasure but transformation. The festival’s rites thus become diasporic acts of reclamation—asserting legitimacy beyond the collapse of China’s political order.

Faced with exile, legitimacy was transposed into kinship structures—a feature deeply embedded in fraternal society traditions. Whether by receiving living representations or integrating their remains into surrogate funerals, mourners assert their allegiance to a “Cultural China,” in which the diaspora—not the homeland—becomes the custodian of ethical and spiritual authority.Footnote ¹⁰² The festival’s mourning rites do not merely recall the past; they assert that a righteous China survived in exile, preserved not through the state but through continuous ritual performance in Southeast Asia.

Myth, Ritual, and the Shadow of Fraternal Associations

This discussion of the Nine Emperor Gods’ hagiographies in Southeast Asia is by no means exhaustive. Rather than a singular account, the festival’s mythos remains contested, shaped by oral transmission and ongoing localization. The Ampang Lam Thian Kiong exemplifies this fluidity: its 1992 hagiography portrays the deities as nine martyrs whose funeral served as a pretext for Ming loyalists to gather under the guise of mourning rites. In the 2000s, however, temple leaders described them as vengeful spirits who haunted the Qing emperor, forcing their own canonization.Footnote ¹⁰³ This shift reflects how competing narratives cross-fertilize and coexist with little friction within the same institution.

Even as the festival adopted region-specific practices and retellings, earlier elements of star worship persisted. The Ampang Lam Thian Kiong, despite venerating the Nine Emperor Gods as Ming martyrs, still names its Inner Palace “Doumu’s Palace” (斗母宫) and has two pagodas dedicated to the Southern and Northern Dippers (南北斗塔) on its grounds—a nod to older celestial traditions. Conversely, temples that uphold the deities’ celestial origins continue to follow ritual structures and dress codes—particularly the white clothing and kerchief, colors indicative of “inferiority, mourning, and death” in an East Asian context—associated with their martyrdom.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Such practices reflect an ongoing process of “superscription,” whereby “older versions” of the same myths are not “erased” but “reconfigured”—each attempting to “establish its own dominance” within the same symbolic space.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

The co-constitutive nature of the Nine Emperor Gods Festival’s myths and rituals—and its development in centers like Phuket, Penang, Taiping, Ipoh, and Ampang—suggests that the festival was shaped by the political economy of tin mining, the demographic profile of male migrants, and the organizational role of fraternal societies. Rather than treating these associations as the sole source of the festival’s ritual form, it is more likely that both the festival and these institutions drew from shared ritual frameworks embedded in late imperial Chinese religious life. As David Ownby and Barend ter Haar have shown, fraternal society ceremonies—such as initiatory and apotropaic rituals—were often indistinguishable from broader Chinese cosmological and ritual traditions.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Although the Nine Emperor Gods Festival was introduced independently of fraternal societies, the latter’s dominance in Southeast Asia shaped its early ritual development. While other deities were venerated among these migrants, the festival’s ritual grammar proved unusually compatible with initiatory idioms of exile, secrecy, and rebirth. Their influence was not imposed but diffused through shared spaces, symbols, and narratives that provided the interpretive and performative frameworks sustaining the festival’s transformation. The festival thus absorbed and reconfigured these elements into a novel ritual system. While direct evidence is limited, the structural alignment between fraternal traditions and the festival’s early form suggests these innovations took root because they drew on familiar cosmologies and symbols—especially among tin miners.

Over time, these early transformations were normalized, codified, and expanded beyond fraternal circles to the broader Chinese religious community. What began as a niche practice became integral to mainstream ritual life. Despite mythological variation, consistent ritual structures suggest that ritual itself holds inherent authority. To be recognized as a Nine Emperor Gods temple today, adherence to these frameworks is essential. Mimetic performance sustains the festival’s identity across generations, even as its myths evolve.

The festival’s adaptability became particularly evident after the 1889 Societies Act, which curtailed fraternal society influence but did not hinder the spread of its ritual framework. Quite the opposite—new festival sites continue to emerge to this day, growing from just five temples in Singapore before World War II to at least twenty-five by 2025; from twenty-eight temples across Malaysia in 1951 to over sixty by the 1990s; and similarly in southern Thailand, where temples observing the festival increased from around thirty in 1997 to approximately fifty by the early 2000s.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ These numbers clearly demonstrate the resilience and expanding appeal of its ritual logic even as its institutional environment changed.

The widespread adoption of this ritual framework ensured the festival’s endurance beyond its fraternal society milieu, embedding it within Southeast Asia’s religious landscape as it gradually detached from its original affiliations. The proliferation of Nine Emperor Gods temples through the post-war economic boom and into the present illustrates how ritual—not institutional affiliation—remains the primary marker of legitimacy. Even as fraternal society dominance faded into relative obscurity, the festival’s ritual structure persisted.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

These shifts in ritual practice were not merely adaptations but incorporated elements already embedded in fraternal society initiations and mythologies. Mourning garments—symbolizing death before rebirth into a sworn brotherhood—and the absence of physical representations of society patriarchs became central to the Nine Emperor Gods Festival. Similarly, expectations of a hidden Ming emperor or Zheng Chenggong, concealed from Qing authority in a mythical and geographically remote location surrounded by treacherous barriers—water among them—that only the faithful could traverse without harm, were reenacted in fraternal society initiation rituals. These same narratives informed eschatological beliefs in which prophesied messianic figures would one day return to overthrow Manchu rule.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ These tropes, motifs, and beliefs—integral to these societies’ lore and continuously reenacted through ritual—diffused into how the Nine Emperor Gods were perceived and venerated in Southeast Asia.

The festival not only absorbed but actively reconfigured fraternal society mythologies and rituals, integrating them into a distinct ritual system. A key example is the Xilu narrative (西魯序), which tells of monks who survived Qing persecution after the Shaolin Temple was destroyed—a myth central to fraternal society traditions that featured an incense censer emerging from water carrying the divine mandate to overthrow the Qing.Footnote ¹¹⁰ While there are no records of fraternal society members reenacting such accounts, they were repurposed among overseas Chinese into a form of “ritual theater,” in which the “ritualization of mythic narratives” served to physically manifest divinities in this world, with the reenacted arrival of the Nine Emperor Gods as an incense censer operating in like manner.Footnote ¹¹¹

A 1927 account of the Nine Emperor Gods Festival underscores the persistent entanglement of fraternal society mythologies with the festival’s diasporic narratives. Appended to a description of the festival at the Hong Kong Street Tow Boh Keong, the account references the Shaolin Temple, where the heads of the Nine Emperor Gods were believed to reside, linking their martyrdom to fraternal society mythologies and drawing parallels to monks beheaded by an emperor who mistook their defense against bandits as an act of treason—tropes consistent with the Xilu narrative.Footnote ¹¹² These motifs also resurfaced in Ampang, where the narrative of fleeing from Hunan after the death of Wan Yunlong—both commonly found in the cosmology and mythology of these fraternal societies—reinforces the influence of their traditions on the festival’s ritual structure.Footnote ¹¹³

The blurred boundaries between myth and ritual are evident in the frequent conflation of fraternal society activities and Nine Emperor Gods Festival rites in both popular imagination and colonial accounts—a confusion not without basis. Though the groups operated independently, their overlap suggests a cross-fertilization that rendered them indistinguishable to outside observers. This was especially apparent in Ampang, where festival rites were entwined with stories of clandestine gatherings. Recall the case of the colonial officer who attempted to raid an initiation, only to be misled when an attendee pointed to an incense censer, claiming it represented the Nine Emperor Gods.

Colonial anxieties over such blurred boundaries were not unfounded. In 1911, when a complaint alleged that the Nine Emperor Gods Festival at the Taiping temple constituted “a secret society organization” (秘密帮会组织), a British official from the Department of Chinese Affairs personally inspected the temple. Obviously familiar with the dress codes and initiatory rites of such organizations, he pressed founder Wang Yiyu with pointed questions: “Why must devotees uniformly wear white shirts and trousers with nine cloth buttons, a white headcloth stamped in red with the Eight Trigrams, and small yellow cloths around their wrists? …Isn’t this attire similar to that of secret societies? (為什麼信徒一律白色衫褲, 九粒布紐扣, 頭纏八卦紅印白頭布, 手腕轉小黃布等一致制服?… 這是否為秘密幫會?)”Footnote ¹¹⁴

While temple representatives managed to deflect his suspicions, the exchange underscores how colonial authorities often viewed festival rites and fraternal society activity as indistinguishable. To them, ritual gatherings were potential sites of subversion. These overlaps—documented in both official records and mythic retellings—demonstrate how the Nine Emperor Gods Festival resonated with fraternal traditions while adapting to new diasporic conditions. Even as fraternal societies faded after the 1889 Societies Act, their symbolic frameworks—cosmologies, rites, and myths—remained embedded in the festival, shaping its evolution into a self-sustaining ritual system beyond its original affiliations.