[5][6][7][8] The temple began as a shrine laid in 1870 by a Hindu immigrant, Hanuman Beem Singh, a wealthy merchant who had been deported to Singapore by the British administration in India.

In response to their religious needs, Singh placed the images of the Hindu deities Vigneshwar and Krishna at the foot of a banyan tree and began praying to it regularly.

[3] After taking over, Sivaraman sponsored an extensive renovation between 1985 and 1989, and the temple was reconsecrated in a Mahakumbhabhishekham ceremony in November 1989, attended by the Minister for Community Development and Foreign Affairs Wong Kan Seng.

[10] It was reconsecrated in 2018 at a 48-day long Mahakumbabishekham ceremony, attended by S. Iswaran, Edwin Tong and Denise Phua and an estimated 10,000 devotees.

It is located on Waterloo Street, next to the Kwan Im Thong Hood Cho Temple, and near a Methodist chapel and the Maghain Aboth Synagogue.

In the late 1980s, a seller of Hainanese chicken rice donated a larger urn, worth approximately S$1,000, to hold the joss sticks.

It is decorated with statues studded with semi-precious stones depicting the wedding scene of Padmavathi and Srinivasar, presided over by the local king, Aksaraja, and in the presence of the gods Siva, Brahma and their consorts.

The exterior is decorated with statues of the dashavatara (the ten major incarnations of the Hindu god Vishnu), Garuda, and a wedding scene.

[13][4][10] In the renovation completed in 2018, eight concrete shrines were replaced with onyx sanctums to improve durability, in view of a decreasing number of temple artists.