[ { "id": 206639, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1972", "page_number": 187, "title": "RAS-1972", "content_text": "THREE CHINESE DEITIES\n\n181\n\nHe has also been seen as a typical standing image of a civil mandarin, when the only method of identifying him was by the title painted on his stand or pedestal. In Kalgan, as will be described below, he is depicted naked with claws, beak and wings.\n\nIn some temples, the images of deities known not to be T'ai Sui or Ying Ch'iao, are called T'ai Sui by the temple keepers, and are prayed to as T'ai Sui. Some of these misidentifications are even to be seen perched on wads of hell money. The best example of this are the distinctive images of the boat people of the Pearl River and Southern Kwangtung province which are to be seen in Singapore and Ipoh, labelled as T'ai Sui, and standing on hell-money. One of these seen in Hong Kong is an image of the Pearl River boat people, normally called the Dragon and Tiger General (*). This is an image of a young man with his right arm raised holding a sword, and his left arm hanging by his side. He wears a robe of green with an animal's face as a stomacher, and with a dragon under his left foot and a tiger under his right. On one instance only, as is to be seen in the photograph, he is to be seen labelled the \"Tai Sui who flew back\" () and is standing on a pile of hell-money. (Plate 18)\n\nFather Doré says that images of T'ai Sui in the Yangtse Valley have six arms, are bald with ear tufts, and three eyes; they wear Taoist crowns and hold in their six hands two swords, a ball and flames, a spear, and a branch of a tree.\n\nThere are thirty-six deities painted as murals on the walls of one Singapore temple, most of whom are Heavenly Masters (A B). Amongst them is Yin Ch'iao, standing, dressed in armour, but with a bare chest and with six arms holding the usual items. Marshal Yin Ch'iao appears, therefore, to be one of the 24 Heavenly Generals and also one of the 36 Heavenly Masters.\n\nIn several works he is given 10 assistants, the last four being the gods of the year, the month, the day and the hour. Their names are given as follows:\n\nLi Ping (李丙) Hwang Ch'eng-i (黃承乙)\n\nChou Teng (周登) and Liu Hung (劉洪)\n\nAll were said to have been slain at the famous battle between good and ... described in The Deification of the Gods, at Wan Hsien Chen (萬仙陣).", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1972.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gm80qf99h", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207544, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1975", "page_number": 312, "title": "RAS-1975", "content_text": "304\n\nNOTES AND QUERIES\n\npatrons of musicians and sketched them without either crab decorations or the dog. The main brother was shown holding a fan in each hand whilst the other two stood beside him with two attendants. Later in this Note, you will see that one of Chief Marshal T'ien's titles is Wu Tai Yuan Shuai. Père Doré described Wu Tai separately and sketched him as a young man with green twigs behind the ears, a large crab on his forehead, a tiny Taoist crown on his bald head and dressed in loose-fitting robes. Wu Tai, according to Doré, was accompanied by two male and two female attendants. This would appear to be the southern provinces' temple version which Doré did not realize was a manifestation of Marshal T'ien.\n\nThere are, as one would expect, many variations in characteristics in Ch'aochow and Fukienese carvings. For instance, occasionally he is represented as bald, or the front of his hair is shaven in Ch'ing fashion making him half-bald; in others he has a long queue or two long pigtails; sometimes he wears a military helmet or a scholar's cap, and in some images he has a black cock under his other foot. In several places he is represented as a youth standing on one foot with both arms raised in a dramatic, theatrical stance, and in others he is standing stolidly, with both feet together holding one or two swords. A sketch of T'ien To Yuan Shuai by a Singaporean Fukienese god carver depicted him with a red face, staring eyes and dressed in scholar's robes. (Plate 21). An actor, one of a company of Ch'aochow players in Bangkok, explained that they only had a tablet in their portable shrine, and that their image with only one crab painted on his forehead, was permanently in a temple. He told me that the single crab on the forehead meant that T'ien was the patron of actors, whereas others with the crab on the mouth represented the middle brother of the T'ien trio who is only prayed to for good health.\n\nIn one sighting in Ipoh, in North Malaya, Marshal T'ien was wearing armour, carried a sword and bell, but was barefoot and had a crab painted on his mouth. He was known to the temple priests to have been a vegetarian monk from Ch'aochow, insane as a child who had cured himself and is now worshipped for a similar cure by parents of the mentally sick. (Plate 22).\n\nAbove his image on a small backstage altar of a Foochow opera troupe in Singapore, was the carved inscription ‘Ministry of Wind", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207547, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1975", "page_number": 315, "title": "RAS-1975", "content_text": "NOTES AND QUERIES \n\n307\n\ncommitted suicide'.... \"This spirit, honoured at Foochow under the name of Wu Tai Yuan Shuai is the same as Lei Hai-Ch'ing (*) of the T'ang dynasty worshipped in several cities in Fukien. The character Hsieh (), crab, has approximately the same sound locally as Hai () the sea, and the willow branches symbolize Verdure, Ch'ing (†). Lei Hai-Ch'ing was a musician and is popularly referred to in the district as Marshal. He died cursing robbers, and for that reason temples were erected to him. Thus the young scholar become apotheosized owing to this play on words having the same or similar sounds. He is represented as attended by two male and two female instrumentalists holding respectively a mandolin, a lute, a violin and a tambourine. To evoke the spirit, his image is placed on a raised platform, its forehead is dabbed with red, it is prayed to and candles and incense burnt before it. The priests kneel in front of it, and then rise, skipping about with dishevelled hair and staring eyes. Crying out that the Spirit has come they scratch their tongues and write charms with the blood. When incense has been lit in the four corners of the room everyone can ask the spirit for what he wants, and the answer is explained by the accompanying musicians. He is frequently prayed to remove abscesses, boils etc. from children'. \n\nI can confirm the latter from medium practices in Singapore, and looking back to the sighting in Ipoh referred to earlier he is also a deity worshipped for a cure for mental diseases in children. \n\nThe following legends were told to me by devotees :— \n\na) Tien is the deification of a rich patron of actors in Foochow city (or Soochow) who lived in the fifteenth century. b) As a handsome child, the youngest son of three, he constantly played pranks on others. An ugly sister-in-law in a fit of pique drew a crab around his open mouth whilst he was asleep, and as a result his soul which had left his body to roam was unable to return. He complained to the Jade Emperor (1) who out of pity adopted him and allowed his soul to inhabit his body again. His mouth was open, incidentally, because he was an unwanted child, thrown out as a babe and suckled by animals! \n\nc) Prince T'ien of Foochow lived for pleasure. He was once sleeping with the wife of a local businessman and awoke to \n\nPage 315\n\nPage 316", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207608, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1975", "page_number": 376, "title": "RAS-1975", "content_text": "Plate 22. Tien To Yuan Shuai in a cave temple in Ipoh.\n\nNorth Malaya, 1969.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1975.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j0995146d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 207923, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1976", "page_number": 311, "title": "RAS-1976", "content_text": "296 \n\nNOTES AND QUERIES \n\n(A✯✯) who founded the Ten Thousand Buddha Temple above Sha Tin in the New Territories, Hong Kong in 1951 (erroneously recorded as 1961). He was a widely known and admired monk who at the age of 24, according to the Temple broadsheet, had been named Buddha Simba in recognition of having perceived the cause of the Universe. He was born in Yunnan in 1878 into the Wu (A) family and was educated in Shanghai and Peking. In the latter place, the record states, he was a \"professor of philosophy\" at Yenching University at the early age of 19 in 1897 before he became a monk. He preached throughout his life and died in April 1965 at the age of 87 in his temple in Sha Tin.\n\nThe story of his interment, exhumation and preservation is described in the temple brochure. The body was placed in a seated position, cross-legged in a wooden box and buried on the hillside behind the temple. There it remained for eight months. Yueh Chi, during his latter days, had instructed that his body should be exhumed after such a period of time, and when uncovered it was found that very little decomposition had taken place. A mark on the lower side of the right ribs excited comment as it appeared to be an image of a tiger, and another on the breast that of a human head. The body was then gilded, dressed in a salmon pink robe and a five-leaf vairocana crown, and enthroned in May 1966 in front of the large image of Amida Buddha which towers some twenty-five feet above him (plate 28). Another image, carved ostensibly in his likeness, is enshrined in a glass case in the rear of a Buddhist nunnery on a spur some two miles from the Ten Thousand Buddha Temple. This carving, one suspects, is stylized. It is gilded, apart from a heavy beard and a head of hair painted shiny black. The image holds a fly whisk, and has a pair of slippers before his throne, but has no crown.\n\nOther forms of image based on human remains, usually of laymen rather than of monks, such as those seen in Singapore and Ipoh made of a mixture of concrete, sand and human ashes, have not been included in this article. Whereas most wealthy devotees achieve recognition by having their donation details carved on the monastery wall, a few, however, will their ashes to be mixed and made into an image in their likeness, warts and all, in addition to donating a final large sum to the establishment.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1976.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209104, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1981", "page_number": 7, "title": "RAS-1981", "content_text": "216\n\nA Republican Book of Receipts in United College Library\n\nThe Hong Kong Collection in United College, Chinese University of Hong Kong, acquired this book of receipts several years ago from a local second-hand book-seller. The volume bears no title. As the Chinese characters in the upper margin (tan-chi chan-ts'un pu*) indicate, a collection of receipts are glued onto its pages. The receipts are dated the 9th year of the Republic, that is, 1920.\n\nThe receipts are of two sorts. A substantial number are receipts for payment for telegrams sent from Hong Kong, chiefly to Shanghai and Macau, but occasionally also to Amoy, Chicago, Havana, San Francisco, Vancouver, Kuala Lumpur and Ipoh. The more interesting ones are acknowledgements of sums ranging from several hundred to 40,000 Hong Kong dollars paid by Sun Fo (Sun Yat-sen's son). Chu Chih-hsin**, Ku Hsiang-ch'in\n\nand others (on their relationship to Sun Yat-sen in 1920, see below). It will take someone with a better knowledge of the political history of the Republican era than this writer to identify all the recipients of these payments. Quite a few, however, are undoubtedly military commanders or warlords: Li Fu-lin acknowledged receipt of 10,000 Hong Kong dollars; 20,000 was paid to commander Hsü at the military headquarters in Swatow, in addition to 9,700 acknowledged on a sheet bearing the heading, \"Office for Raising Military Funds in Swatow and Mei hsien, Kwangtung\". A receipt for 30,000 dollars was made out to Sun Fo by the Kwangtung Provincial Treasury, and another one for 5,000 made out to him states explicitly that this sum was derived from donations by overseas Chinese. The fleet at Fu-men (\") received two payments, of 600 and 1,000 Hong Kong dollars respectively. Some receipts were also made out for purchases (several field telephones, 1,000 items of clothing; 2,000 water flasks). Most of these purchases were not substantial, the exception being a deposit for 40,000 dollars for an unspecified machine. Documents pasted on the first page consist of enquiries made about rice-mill-", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1981.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ff36bt18m", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213066, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1993", "page_number": 134, "title": "RAS-1993", "content_text": "115\n\npossibly the one said to have been carried over by Koxinga, had miraculously brought it under control\n\nImages of Pao-sheng Ta-ti have been noted on altars in only two temples in Hong Kong, one in a Ch'ao-chou refugee community and the other in a Hakka community temple. Although his image has not been seen in any Cantonese temples there, it has been noted in temples where Cantonese are predominant in Ipoh and Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia.\n\nIn Pao-sheng Ta-ti temples, in SE Asia in particular, devotees take articles of clothing usually worn by a sick person who is unable to come to the temple in person, and wave them through the incense smoke before his altar. This can be done by the devotee himself, but normally the act is performed by a priest or member of the temple staff with a formalised ritual. The article is then taken back to the sick person who, wearing it, believes that Pao-sheng now knows about his illness and will do something about it.\n\nHakka vendors of herbal medicines venerate the Great Emperor as their patron, and in Malaysia a Hakka devotee claimed that this deity is worshipped mainly by Hakkas, with Wu T'ao himself having been a Hakka. Vaughan in Singapore in 1878 also claimed that Hakkas in eastern Kuangtung worshipped him, but as the King of Medicine, Yao Wang, and described the image of Pao-sheng Ta-ti in the temple in Telok Ayer Street as a ‘jolly looking elderly gentleman who watches over the sick and afflicted.' Vaughan explained that the title, that of Ta Tao Kung, was particularly used by Singaporean Hakkas.\n\nIn SE Asia, Pao-sheng Ta-ti shares the main altar with one or two other deities from much the same part of Fukien. These are Ma Tsu and Ch'ing-shui Tsu-shih, with Ch'ing-shui Tsu-shih the senior and Pao-sheng Ta-ti the junior deity. There have also been a number of innuendoes hinted at by temple keepers that there is constant friction between Ma Tsu and Pao-sheng Ta-ti following the failure to successfully arrange a marriage between the two.\n\nCh'ing-shui Tsu-shih\n\nThe second of the three cults, that of The Patriarch of Clearwater, Ch'ing-shui Tsu-shih, is a popular local Fukienese healing deity", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1993.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833t302", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215108, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-2000", "page_number": 204, "title": "RAS-2000", "content_text": "161\n\nand the Fulu particular of two opera companies, the Xipi Pai and Erhuang Pai [or Fi Pai], the latter, the northern school, being especially dedicated to woodwinds3. In legend he is said to have had an emotional reunion with the soul of his dead concubine, Yang Guifei, in the palace of Guanghan on the Moon.\n\n4\n\nA tablet on a minor altar at the rear of a secondary hall in the temple of the City God in Hsinchu in northern Taiwan refers to him as Tang Xuan Zong, whilst his usual title in Taiwanese temples of the Lord of the Western Qin, Xi Qin WangyeE is not usually understood beyond Taiwan. There is no image, whereas in the Ma Tsu temple in Taipei a side altar is dedicated to him and his image, portraying him as a standard scholar-official with a black beard, is flanked by two very elderly male aides.\n\nIn South-east Asia images of the emperor have been seen in temples in Seremban and Ipoh in Malaysia, and in Singapore, in some of which he is simply referred to as Zunzhu Mingwang, the Lord Prince Ming, 尊主明王,\n\nAn image seen on the only altar in a side hall of the temple on Miaofeng Shan in Beijing's Western Hills and identified as Tang Ming Huang, is better known in the temple as the God of Happiness, Xi Shen [Photograph 2]. He is referred to as Liyuan Shen, and is portrayed as a smiling figure with beard and moustache, standing with his hands in a theatrical pose. His modern image is dressed in imperial yellow robes decorated with a large dragon and the whole body of the image is swathed in a red robe placed there by devotees.\n\nDisappointingly, there appears to be no image of the Concubine Yang on any altars. However, a modern [1996] tableau in an old temple, now converted into a theme-park, depicts in a series of life-size plaster images scenes ranging from the Tang Ming Huang's first sight of the Concubine Yang bathing, progressing through stages of his infatuation though ending before her death and his overthrow. This can be seen on a low hill overlooking the bend in the Yellow River at the south-western tip of Shanxi province, at a place known as Yang Guifei's pool. The main altar has the Tang Ming Huang and the Concubine sitting with her pouring wine for him. Before the altar stand three incense pots, a container holding fortune spills and plastic fruit as an offering and before", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n", "rank": 0 } ]