The German Girl of Pulau Ubin

A shrine on Pulau Ubin, Singapore, to a German girl said to have died in a quarry in August 1914; William L. Gibson found no evidence her family lived on the island and traced the story to a man named Chia, first in print in 1987.

Singapore's National Heritage Board, on Roots.sg, gives the story as it is told. When the First World War began, the colonial British government interned German nationals as enemy aliens. A German girl living on Pulau Ubin with her family is said to have run from the authorities on a night in August 1914 and died after falling into a granite quarry. The shrine honours her memory.

Wikipedia says gamblers came from Singapore and across the Malay peninsula to leave offerings there in the hope she would bring them luck. A quarrying company built a more permanent shrine on the site in 1974. Wikipedia's words for it are "a small yellow Chinese temple", and her remains are believed to have been dug up then and placed in an urn there. Mothership reported in 2016 that villagers say they have seen her ghost, and that she has since become a local deity, Datuk Maiden, fondly called Na Du Gu Niang.

William L. Gibson examined the story for BiblioAsia, the National Library Board's journal, in 2021. He found no coffee plantation working on the island in 1914 and nothing showing a German family lived there then. He describes a man named Chia, whose first print interview, in the Shin Min Daily News in 1987, gave the girl Dutch-German ancestry and said her Dutch parents made their home on a coffee plantation in the west of the island. Gibson points out that Holland stayed neutral in the war and that the British authorities never interned Dutch nationals. In later interviews Chia described the family only as German.