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OBSERVATIONS AT THE JIU FESTIVAL OF SHEK O AND TAI LONG WAN, 1986
CHAN WING-HOI
I. Introduction
The jiu festival of Shek O and Tai Long Wan on Hong Kong Island reported in this paper was celebrated from 17th October 1986 to 20th October 1986. According to the villagers, this was the sixteenth celebration which took place once every ten years. During the festival Taoist priests were hired to perform rites, and puppeteers performed puppet shows on a temporary stage. A poster put up by the festival committee referred to the duration as three days and four nights. By the standard of jiu celebrations in the New Territories, this would count as a "three-day jiu". As in the case of celebrations in the New Territories, the hired Taoist priests started with an opening session on the evening of the first day, and continued with daily processions and non-repeating major rites for three days. On 19th October, the main day of the festival, the villagers participated in a major procession to the celebrating villages.
The Shek O festival I found very much a repetition of the pattern found in the New Territories. The schedule and content of the rites were exactly the same except perhaps for the fact that the procession on the main day involved the main god of the celebration as well, and the priests hired were those usually seen in the New Territories. However, whereas in the New Territories, only bona fide villagers enjoyed the exclusive right to organize the jiu, here in Shek O the participants included indigenous villagers as well as outsiders. They included people who spoke different dialects, some having moved into the area only in the last ten years. Moreover, in Shek O, the spirit tablets for the ancestors of individuals who contributed extra money for the purpose were also displayed, and this practice is usually found only in Yu Laan rituals. Some of these features that seem peculiar to Shek O are probably related to the nature of the settlement, of which I learned only a little in the few visits I made during the celebration,