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NOTES AND QUERIES
advice she picked it up, and it immediately jumped onto her wrist and stuck fast. This was the sign that she was to marry Guang Ze and the next and every night Guang Ze visited her and talked to her all through the night. Her mother became angry and forbade her to see him and the Taoist priest refused to allow his daughter to be married to Guo. He even planned to marry her quickly to someone else but as the sedan chair passed Guo's temple, Guo took her from the sedan and replaced her with a rock without the chair bearers seeing. The furious father suspected Guo, went to the temple and found his daughter, but as a statue beside Guo's.
Another version was that as her daughter had become obviously pregnant the mother asked her daughter to cut a piece of the robe off her nightly visitor. This the daughter did and it only took the mother a few days to discover the pieces were from the robe of the image of Guang Ze in a nearby temple. The father, a powerful Taoist magician, realizing his power was far less than Guo's and that he was dying, as a last wish asked for four pieces of burning charcoal to be put one at each corner of his coffin when it was placed in the temple after his death. However, reading the father's mind, Guo transformed himself into an old lady and persuaded the temple keeper's wife to remove the burning charcoals. She was almost too late, managing to remove only three pieces. The last one caused the corner of the temple to catch fire, whereupon one wall fell in. But for Guo's warning all four walls would have fallen and Guo's image would have been destroyed.
THE IMMORTAL FAN (樊仙)
(Cantonese: Fan Sin)
A unique folk religion cult is centred around the village of Wun Yiu,* a mile or so above Taipo, in the New Territories of Hong Kong, where his gilded image is to be seen alone on a temple altar. There he is depicted as a seated Mandarin with a black beard and white eyebrows and, according to the temple keeper, without any special recognition characteristics. FAN has not been seen in any other temple within the two territories of Hong Kong & Macau.
* See A Gazetteer of Place Names in Hong Kong, Kowloon and the New Territories (Hong Kong, Government Printer n.d. but 1960) p. 176 under Sheung and Ha Wun Yiu. Plates 23(a) and 23(b) illustrate this Note.