[
    {
        "id": 212162,
        "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-1990",
        "page_number": 104,
        "title": "RAS-1990",
        "content_text": "81\n\nAlso in Taiwan lone images occupy the altar of a number of small temples in the Hsinchu area. In each case the image is a portrait rather than a standard image, of elderly men, obviously ancestral images, revered and prayed to as local benefactors by local residents who rarely know their personal names or life stories. They are all from Hakka communities, and are referred to as Ta-jen A. They include Yang Ta-jen, Huang Ta-jen, Hsieh Ta-jen, Heng Ta-jen and Chao Ta-jen. Presumably each had some social position and status and their present day minor cults have been stimulated by the construction of a decorous and specific shrine or temple housing its charismatic image.\n\nThe following are examples of the legends and cults connected with four deceased locals whose charisma led to them being honoured and later revered as local deities. Two were local secret society gang leaders, the third a scholar who was a renowned healer and the fourth was a local philanthropist.\n\nYeh Te-lai, a Hakka immigrant to Kuala Lumpur where he is better known as Yap Ah-loy, was appointed Kapitan China by the Sultan of Selangor in 1868 with the right to tax tin and opium and to judge lawsuits between Malays and Chinese. During inter-racial troubles his private army of some 2500 Chinese fought many battles against his rivals. He was a go-getter who succeeded in establishing a firm business base for the community in Kuala Lumpur, a 'frontier town' where he maintained law and order by means of his secret society 'soldiers' under their generals, one of whom was Sheng Ming-li and another Ch'en Chung-lai. Ming-li and Chung-lai were both murdered in Negri Sembilan in about 1860, and on the orders of Yeh Te-lai, were deified and their images placed on the main altars in some four temples, in Rasah, Semenyih and Kuala Lumpur. Ming-li was referred to as Shih-yeh (Adviser) or Ssu Shih-yeh Kung-li (the Fourth Secretary [in an official yamen]). His image and that of Chung-li used to be borne around Kuala Lumpur during their annual festival on the 1st of the ninth lunar month. Legend has it that when Sheng Ming-li was decapitated his blood was white, not red, a miracle in the eyes of his followers, who buried him near Malacca.\n\nThe second case is Hsin Ting. Hsin Ting is the main deity in his temple in Taipei where he is portrayed as a scholar holding a scroll. Although his cult was carried to Taipei by a scholar who had passed his examinations after praying to the deity, Hsin Ting has reverted to his original skill of medicine and is now prayed to by the sick for",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 215071,
        "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": 167,
        "title": "RAS-2000",
        "content_text": "124\n\nHong, was a special deity said to save people from the 'fifteen bad deaths.' Images of both Yin Hong and Yin Jiao flanked that of the Jade Emperor on the latter's altar. The brothers were portrayed, rather surprisingly, sitting naked and with claws, beaks and wings. Grootaers writing about the Kalgan district of northern China, said that Yin Jiao was never seen on altars except as an attendant of the Jade Emperor.\n\nIn a small folk religion temple at the roadside in Kuala Selangor an image of Taisui has a tiger sitting beside him and when asked the reason for this the temple custodian explained that Taisui keeps a tight control over the tiger who would otherwise eat people's luck. A similar image, holding a bell in his right hand and with a pair of tigers, stands on the Taisui altar in a temple in Cholon [Saigon].\n\nIn Ningbo in the 1890s the Gods of Time, of the year, months, days and hours were, according to one missionary, all represented with long black moustaches, and with the central one seated beneath a triple scarlet umbrella richly embroidered in gold representing the highest emblem of authority.\n\nSixty images [presumably Taisui, though the observer did not actually spell it out] ranged down the side walls of the Temple of the Three Emperors in the Native City in Shanghai in 1906, with twenty-six on one side and thirty-four on the other. Paper 'shoes' representing silver sycee [money] were burnt as offerings.\n\nOther images of Taisui have been referred to in all parts of China by western travellers in groups of sixty. One traveller, Grainger, noted all sixty in one temple in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province in 1921, were worshipped for rain and called 'The Spirits of the Rain Dragon of the Year' [Dangnian Xingyu Longshen].\n\nThe Legend of Taisui\n\n19\n\n18\n\nThe story of Yin Jiao begins with him being born a lump of formless flesh which so horrified his father, King Zhou E, that he ordered it to be abandoned outside the city walls. The lump was recognised as an immortal, the caul split open and the child removed. Cared for by a hermit he was brought up and nursed by one of the Eight Immortals, He Xiangu. When he came of age he was told about his birth and about",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n",
        "rank": 0
    }
]