Loyang Tua Pek Kong Temple spends $1.5m to modernise Lamp of Merit system

Loyang Tua Pek Kong is one of the few temples in Singapore that has Hindu deities worshipped alongside Chinese deities.

The temple's event coordinator Jeffery Tan, 67, told The New Paper that the temple's digitisation of Lamp of Merit was to make registering for a unit easier for devotees.

Devotees light a Lamp of Merit for health, harmony and prosperity.

The temple's devotees pay $50 to have a lamp lit for a year.

With the digitisation, the registration process is reduced from a month to just a minute.

Devotees register a unit at the temple's kiosk, key in their personal information and pay the $50 registration fee.

To identify their lamps, devotees simply key in their handphone number into the system to find out which tower the unit is housed in. The entire row of lamps where their unit is would be dimmed with only their unit blinking.

There are 28 pagodas in the new system, each with 99 rows of 20 units. Of the 55,400 units available at Loyang Tua Pek Kong, which spent $1.5 million on the lamp system, 30,000 have already been taken up.

In the old system, temple staff had to climb up and down the pagodas to label the lamps with the names of devotees.

Loyang Tua Pek Kong is not the first temple to have gone digital but Mr Tan, who has been working at the temple for 27 years, believes its pagodas of lamps are the tallest in Singapore.

He sees an average of 20,000 regular renewals every year, with the new system just being implemented in Dec 2024.