So many people have been critical to this project but none more than Keith Stevens (1926-2015). It is his legacy in the form of notes and photographs that is honoured in this website. With enormous help from many quarters I have attempted to preserve, edit, and add to his vast body of knowledge.

We recently found a short piece written by Keith himself explaining his fascination with Chinese Deities and giving an explanation of their wider reverence. You can read this Document from the link in the Site Resources.

Keith Stevens started feeling interest and curiosity for things Chinese from his early teens when he lived in pre-WW2 (1939 - 1945) Liverpool, a large English port with ships, docks and slums - all displaying Chinese signboards. The Chinese characters fascinated him and so he joined the army, learnt Mandarin and worked with the intelligence services travelling all over South East Asia and eventually to China. He purchased his first Chinese god, a blue and white porcelain statue of Lu Dong Bin and over the course of his lifetime acquired over a thousand deity statues. 

In 1953 he was sent to Singapore where he met his wife Nora , they produced three daughters [Carol, Gillian & Ruth] and Keith spent much of his free time, with a road directory in hand, exploring the city, sleuthing out temples and gods to record. He maintained a manual filing system worthy of an intelligence-gathering organisation. 

In 1978 Keith heard about my own “templing” activities in Singapore, and arranged a meeting at the Negara Hotel in Orchard Road.   He must have been disappointed, though he didn’t show it, that I was way behind him in my knowledge at that time.  In fact I was only just beginning my own “journey of the gods”.  We maintained some contact, he would write me letters, and occasionally send me on errands to take a photo of this god, or find a legend for that one.
 
When he published the long-awaited Chinese Gods: The Unseen World of Spirits and Demons, it was widely acclaimed. In characteristic fashion Keith dedicated the book to his family and helpers. The book was extremely useful for researchers and beginners in the field, but was missing many of the less popular and more rarely seen deities.  Keith told me he had originally intended that the book would have included over 700 pages, but this was not economically feasible for his publisher to produce. So the published book had to be reduced to the 200 pages we know. This website attempts to fill and expand on this gap of knowledge.

Keith continued to work on his military intelligence style files on the Chinese deities after he retired and eventually stopped travelling. From his home in Mersham, Kent, he catalogued his deity statues and amassed 60 A4 size files of information on 1600 researched deities many with photographs. These were maintained in alphabetical order.  We often discussed producing a larger version of his Chinese Gods book, which would include all his researches, but we were regrettably not able to do so before his death.

In the following year, 2016, an auction of his deities, books and notes, was arranged by his family at the Canterbury Auction Gallery. I was able to make the trip to UK and attend, successfully accomplishing my target of acquiring Keith Stevens notes and photographs on the Chinese deities. Supported by my wife Frances and her brother Austen Wilks we managed to ship over 55 cartons of statues, notes, photographs and papers to Penang, Malaysia.

I immediately set to work putting this massive quantity of material into some order. I was dismayed to find out that five of the Deity folders had gone missing. Simply lost in the transfer.  I made enquiries but to no avail.  Later through the kind and helpful efforts of the Stevens family, in particular Mrs Carol Clarke, who agreed to let me obtain the information from her father’s computer hard drive. From this we could save the already digitally downloaded files. This meant that we presumably had in our possession the entire text of Keith’s work, albeit missing the images that were lost with the five missing folders. These we could access by our own efforts and from the expanding online content.

Little did I know how useful the collection of photographs I had been amassing over four decades of travelling over south East Asia, in particular those of Singapore and Malaysian temples, taking up over five terabytes of space on the computer hard drive, would one day be so serendipitously utilised to illustrate the current project. Perhaps it’s not so surprising that Keith’s visits to so many temples in different towns and cities so well matched with my own schedules that took place ten to fifteen years later with the much-improved photographic technology now available.

Another problem was that in the 1990's Keith changed his computer from an IBM to an Apple Macintosh. Many of the fonts he had used did not survive the transfer to the new operating system . We soon realised there was no way to retrieve them.  The lost fonts meant that the extensive Chinese text was now corrupted and illegible.  Fortunately we had the hard copies of the files, minus the ones lost in transit. But for the purposes of digital display 80% of the Mandarin text, now corrupted, had to be removed. 

An additional issue was that most of Keith’s text was produced in the Wade-Giles version of the Chinese text. Very few people use that currently, as the Pinyin format is normally used. One of the many tasks undertaken in the last three years has been to change the index and heading names to Pinyin, while still keeping the Wade-Giles form as a link to the original hard copy files.  It was considered at this point to be a too massive job to convert all of the text.  By use of a Wade-Giles convertor it might be possible to manage an accurate translation of Mandarin text. If researchers require a copy of the original hard copy text, it is possible to write to me for it, please contact me through this link.

At this point I must express my deep gratitude to Richard Brewer, my friend and website creator, for his immense assistance and encouragement for this project. Richard told me that this was the best time to reproduce Keith’s legacy in digital form. There would be no limitation to volume and content. We could offer anyone interested the entirety of Keith Stevens work. If not for Richard, this project would probably remain in dusty cardboard boxes. His dedicated efforts and creative ideas have resulted in bookofxianshen becoming the largest and most comprehensive resource available currently for studying the Chinese gods.

Also appreciation must given to Keith Stevens' daughters Carol Clark, Gillian Sutch, and Ruth Hall, who have graciously and generously encouraged me in this effort to showcase their father’s legacy.

Acknowledgement must be made to “PC” (known to his friends as “Sotong”) who was with me from the very beginning of the work and my long time field-trip comrade. He wishes to remain anonymous, and I will respect that. Through “PC” I met with Shanghai blogger, Mandarin teacher, and Taoist priest, Jingchun also known as Laozhouzhou. His deep knowledge of the subject and willingness to answer my daily research questions has been immense to the project. Master Jave Wu, a practising Taoist priest from Singapore, was my teacher in the early days of my interest in the topic, who I much relied on for information on local worship of the deities. The willingness of these sifus to share sacred knowledge with me, answer difficult questions, and spend precious time showing me temples and introducing me to new Deities and their legends, deserve my fullest gratitude. Whatever modest amount of knowledge I am able to retain is due to these masters and brothers. This is only topped by the wealth of information left here by Keith Stevens available now for all of us to relish and digest.


Shen Yu, my friend and computer doctor, has been vital to the bookofxianshen project, particularly at times when I could only pull my own hair out because of failing computer technology. Shen Yu always arrived to save not only the day but also my sanity. Furthermore he introduced me to Penang businessman Soon Kok Wei when I needed a translator and research assistant.  Kok Wei’s passion for Chinese history with bi-lingual knowledge of both Mandarin and English, besides a few other tongues has been a virtual godsend.   Between us so far we have created 50 new Deity titles for the project. 

Dean Wang, a Singapore researcher, has recently come aboard to assist with deity identification and the always important  “second opinion”. Jennifer Welch, one time friend and co-author of several articles with Keith Stevens, has kindly assisted with my questions on her travels with Keith and information on Penang deities she documented for Keith during a visit in 1997, in particular Chang E and her rabbit and “The overseer of the lake of blood” with his crimson red beard and hair. Also my thanks to Andy Yeoh for contributing photos and important information about San Zhong Wang, “The Three Loyal Dukes”.

Many others deserve acknowledgement for their assistance personally to me over the last four decades and to the project.  Temple Chairmen, Tangkis, and “Templing” companions such as my “brothers” Ah Loon and Ah Lau from Penang. I thank you all for sharing this wonderful journey.

I wish to acknowledge Hannibal Taubes for including me on an informal field trip to Yu County in Hebei/Shanxi which helped widen my knowledge of North China religious iconography and personally experience for myself the wonderful old temple murals from Ming and early Qing Dynasty times. I recommend visiting Hannibal’s website “twosmallblocks”to see for yourself.

I would also like to John Soo for personally showing me the Henghua and other temples in his home town Kuching.

I have attempted to acknowledge parties where we have used text and imagery from third party sources. In most cases we have left the citation links. In the event that this was not possible, and I have used your photo without due acknowledgment, please do let us know and I will immediately correct this. Also if you wish for a particular photo to be removed for whatever reason please contact me. To fill gaps we have “borrowed” a small proportion of images from other blogs and websites. Where appropriate acknowledgment is missing, we apologise for it and will correct as soon as we are informed.

So the website bookofxiansheng consists of Keith Stevens’s original unpublished research augmented with my own studies and information from other sources. In many ways online publication is the best format for a study such as this as new material is constantly emerging. It is also more collaborative and we invite other scholars to participate, correct and add to the work. It is our hope that this resource will provide a better understanding of Xian, Shen, and Gui to all researchers and interested parties.

Without the help, assistance, encouragement of all the persons named above this project could not have proceeded. During this time my wife Frances has been my main support and provided constant inspiration, and I am very grateful to her.

I have felt all along that Keith Stevens from his elevated official position in the Department of Celestial Matters smiles benignly on our efforts and guides our decision making with the same compassion, skill, and humour as he showed in his own eventful life.