Singapore · Wood Carving / Religious Craft
金身 (Kim Sin — Hokkien: "golden body")
Kim Sin (金身, literally "golden body" in Hokkien) is the Singapore Chinese craft of hand-carving and restoring wooden statues of Taoist deities for temple worship — a permanent devotional object, carved and painted piece by piece, distinct from the ephemeral paper effigies (zhi zha) burned as funeral offerings and already documented elsewhere in this archive (CRAFT-0259). Say Tian Hng Buddha Shop, established in 1840 in Singapore's Chinatown, is the city's last surviving workshop of this kind: according to the family's own account, the Ng family's woodworking lineage traces back roughly 700 years to the early Ming dynasty, learned from a master in Tongan, Fujian province, and the shop itself has served local Chinese temples with hand-carved Kim Sin for around 120 years. Every statue is manually carved and painted, and the workshop also restores older deity statues brought in by temples and individual devotees.
Risk level: Critically Endangered · Not UNESCO-listed
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