CHINESE MONASTERIES, TEMPLES, SHRINES AND ALTARS IN HONG KONG AND MACAU
KEITH G. Stevens*
Several works on Hong Kong Chinese temples have been published over the past few years, notably the Hong Kong Government's publication This is Hong Kong: Temples1 which surveyed in detail twelve of Hong Kong's hundreds of temples. Also, during most of 1980 and 1981, a series of short articles in Chinese have appeared on alternate days in a vernacular daily.2 These turned out to be over-amplified essays contributed by readers on specific aspects of temples, their keepers, deities and furnishings but which contained numerous gross, inexcusable and even inexplicable errors. A further book as yet unseen, but referred to in at least one bibliography, is Chinese Temples in Hong Kong Island, Hong Kong by Chuang Shen, a University of Hong Kong monograph, dated 1978 but still in mid-1981 not yet published.
In this article I have recorded my impressions of Chinese temples3 in Hong Kong and Macau together with facts gathered during fifteen years of research into Chinese iconography. As I am neither an architect nor an interior decorator, nor yet an anthropologist, the decoration and construction of the interior and exterior of temples, and the symbolism of the items the temples contained, have been described from a lay viewpoint.
Unlike Western churches and Moslem mosques, Chinese folk religion temples are the residences of the Gods, and are not centres of conducted group worship. In Buddhist temples and monasteries group worship is a daily routine, but only for a limited number of people usually resident monks and nuns. Apart from the one day each year when the main deity's feast day is celebrated and devotees descend on the temple in their hordes, temples attract, in the main, very few devotees who wish, for their own personal reasons, to offer worship, reverence or supplication to individual images or tablets on temple altars.
* The author is well-known to readers of this Journal from previous notes and articles on the gods of China.
Place names can be found in the Hong Kong Government's official publications. A Gazetteer of Place Names in Hong Kong, Kowloon and The New Territories.