The Barbie of Pulau Ubin

In Singapore, on the island of Pulau Ubin, there has been a shrine for more than 100 years dedicated to a girl who died more than a century ago. What makes this shrine special is that since 2007, instead of a memorial urn, it has housed a Barbie doll, specifically requested by the girl’s spirit.

The Barbie of Pulau Ubin

The girl’s full story is lost somewhere between truth and legend, but the few “certain” facts about her death are these: she was German, and at the beginning of the last century she was in Singapore with her parents. It was 1914, and Britain’s suspicion of foreigners in its colonies, at the dawn of the First World War, was growing ever stronger.

For this reason the British army decided to investigate the girl’s parents, who were suspected of being spies. When the soldiers burst into the couple’s home, their daughter managed to escape, but fell from a cliff and died. Some time later the villagers found her remains and gave them a proper burial.

It was the people of Pulau Ubin who built a shrine in memory of that innocent victim, placing an urn inside it. People visited the shrine for years, until in 2007 something incredible happened.

A man from Pulau Ubin had a strange dream in which a Caucasian girl took him to a shop and pointed at a Barbie doll. The dream repeated itself exactly for two more nights, so the man decided to look for the shop he had visited in his dreams for three nights. It did not take him long to find it and, once inside, he was astonished to see the Barbie doll the girl in his dream had pointed to.

He decided to buy it and place it on the shrine dedicated to the memory of the German girl who had died more than 100 years earlier, in front of the urn already there. Since then people have visited the shrine and left cosmetics such as lipstick, perfume and nail polish as offerings, but also toys and drinks. The shrine is visited by both locals and tourists, who ask the girl for protection or good health.

A true story?

Today the shrine, known as the German Girl Shrine, is one of the island’s best-known attractions. The original urn, according to some sources, was stolen.

But did the German girl’s story really happen this way? In 2021 the researcher William L. Gibson searched Singapore’s archives at length without finding any historical evidence to confirm it. The first newspaper article about the shrine, from 1985, does not even mention Germans: it speaks of the grave of a Javanese princess. The German girl’s story only appeared in the media in 1987, from interviews with an islander, Chia Yeng Keng, who had in turn heard it from others. Legend or reality, the nameless girl of Pulau Ubin has still not been forgotten.

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