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Heaven image and place it in their own tang-liu. Whoever had a son born that year would buy a lamp and hang it there. The number of lamps thus meant the number of additions to the lineage. If one's lamp had not been lit at the tang-liu during the year of his birth, he would not have the right to receive the ritual meat at his ancestral hall,
The lantern remained lit until the fifteenth day of the first lunar month. On that day, each lineage lighted a whole chain of beautifully decorated firecrackers and then sent the hang-tseung (be it Kwaan-kung or the Goddess of Heaven) back to its own heung temple where it would remain until the following New Year. Whoever caught the first firecracker falling down would have all the luck for the year. So everyone struggled to catch it. Fights often occurred in the attempt. This was known as the fa-paau event (打炮).
Another event connected with the New Year Festival was the village opera. Sometimes professionals were invited to perform puppet shows; sometimes a Cantonese Opera troupe was invited and sometimes the villagers themselves performed. In all these cases, the Kwaan and the Oo organized their own performances.
The worship of the Earth God happened on the twenty-eighth day of the seventh lunar month. The Kwaan and the Oo worshipped their own Earth Gods in their own ancestral hall.
In contrast to Na-loh, Lung-tsai She was a picture of integration in its ceremonial life. There were no ancestral halls in the village for the Kwaan, the Wong or the Tang, only a community temple. Nonetheless, my informants called it their "village ancestral hall”. This was probably because it had a lay-out similar to an ancestral hall. Like the latter, there was a huge wooden board inside the temple with the name Lung-tsai Hall (龍仔堂) written on it. Below this was an altar for putting all the sacrificial meat. Underneath was an Earth God shrine. But unlike an ancestral hall, there were no tablets at all in the temple.
The village also owned a hang-tseung of the Goddess of Heaven which was placed in a multi-surname heung temple on the outskirts of Ts'ung-long Heung. The hoi-tang ceremony was performed in the Lung-tsai Hall instead of a tang-liu. On New Year's day, the Wong, the Kwaan and the Tang each sent representatives to form a joint procession to take the Goddess back to the hall. When the
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