Leong San See Temple

This guide to Leong San See Temple in Singapore follows Reverend Chun Wu, a monk who arrived in 1913 with almost nothing but a ceramic urn and a small statue of Guan Yin, and who began caring for the sick out of a few wooden huts on Race Course Road. It traces how those huts grew into a full stone-and-timber temple by 1926, funded by merchant Tan Boon Liat and built, as the story goes, without a single nail. Look up at the roofline, where dragons, chimeras and phoenixes fired in distant kilns still crown the temple above Little India.