Ad hoc sinographic romanization in Indonesia
[This is a guest post by Mok Ling.]
I recently paid a visit to the oldest Chinese temple in the city of Tangerang in Indonesia, Boen Tek Bio (文德廟 ["literary virtue"], note the Dutch-influenced spelling) which was renovated some time in September this year. I was very pleased to see they did a pretty good job restoring all the inscriptions and pieces of calligraphy.
I noticed some (very old) custodians of the temple were handing out talismans (fú 符), and very helpfully, a hand-drawn diagram explaining each part of the talisman (see the attached diagram) — notice the ad-hoc Mandarin romanizations and Indonesian translations of each element).
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