[ { "id": 208897, "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-1980", "page_number": 59, "title": "RAS-1980", "content_text": "CHINESE MONASTERIES, TEMPLES, SHRINES, ALTARS\n\n31\n\nrural areas, and the very ancient agrarian cult, the God of the Harvest, Soil and Grain, She Ji(4) whose shrines are found usually at the edge of villages and, like those of the Earth God, are too numerous to count.\n\nThe only general conclusion to be drawn from all this suggests that the vitality of the cults of deities has in general declined, whereas a limited number, in squatter resettlement areas, continue to thrive by acting as a focus for the minority Chaozhou, Hakka and Minnan immigrants.\n\nNOTES AND REFERENCES\n\nThis is Hong Kong: Temples. By Joyce Savidge, Hong Kong Government Printer, 1977.\n\n2 Dong Fong Ri Bao.\n\n* In this article the English word \"temple\" is used to include uniquely Buddhist and uniquely Daoist temples and monasteries; popular or folk religion temples (which may or may not contain Buddhist and Daoist deities); community temples (both private and public), and ancestral or clan temples. A shrine is an open-fronted room or box-like construction, either at the wayside, under a tree, outside a temple or monastery or hanging on a wall. Outside permanent shrines are referred to in Hong Kong as \"Exposed temples\" (露天廟). They are by definition unmanned.\n\nA \"community temple\" is one built by funds raised within a limited community and administered by a committee, either of a city, village or suburb, or of an ethnic group of expatriates. Private temples are built by private bodies such as:\n\n(a) A family or clan.\n\n(b) An individual monk or nun who raises funds by subscription and who leaves the temple to an acolyte at his or her death.\n\n(c) A trade or profession.\n\nPrivate temples, despite being private and closed to outsiders, are also usually controlled by a committee. A few private temples continue to remain so but gradually most become public, particularly as the number of devotees and images of deities within the temple increase. Some Buddhist temples, privately owned with the affairs and finances in the hands of the owners, are usually also the home of the owners and the ancestral tablets of the owner's family appear on the altars with or beside the deities. Privately owned is not the same as being open or closed to the public. Some indeed may be closed, but the majority are open to the public.\n\nOnly very occasionally are icons or images of deities to be found in clan temples, whereas ancestral tablets are frequently to be seen in community temples. Advantage is taken in the latter of the duties performed by the temple keeper (which clan temples do not have) which", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1980.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/kh04md207", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215318, "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-2001", "page_number": 95, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "THE POPULAR RELIGION GODS\n\nTHE HAINANESE\n\nKEITH STEVENS\n\n43\n\nIntroduction\n\nThis article is a study of the popular religion gods to be found on the altars of Chinese folk religion temples on the island of Hainan as well as in 'Hainanese temples' within the confines of former colonial territories in south-east Asia. I will be endeavouring to isolate the purely Han Chinese Hainanese deities from those of their surrounding neighbours, the non-Han minority peoples on Hainan itself as well as from emigrant Han Chinese communities in south-east Asia. The latter includes emigrants who speak the Han linguistic groups of Hakka, Hokkien (and its sub-groups including Minnan and Hengwa (Xinghua)), Cantonese (and two of its sub-groups) and Guangxi, as well as the smaller groups such as Chaozhou [Swatowese].\n\nThe tropical island of Hainan, literally \"South of the Ocean,\" lies off the south coast of China and was formerly part of Guangdong province. In 1988 it became a province in its own right. 150 miles in length and 100 in breadth, it is one sixth the size of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, half the size of Ceylon and four times the size of Cyprus, with its main port of Haikou and the provincial capital, Qiongzhou, both on its northern coast.\n\nSeparating the island of Hainan from the mainland is the Qiongzhou Straits, with the 170-mile-long Leizhou peninsula in Guangdong province leading into the mainland proper. The proximity of the Leizhou peninsula has led to a small number of the deities with a Guangxi base being incorporated into Hainanese legend and carried by emigrants to all parts of south-east Asia, often without the connection being realised. Devotees in distant parts have assumed that these deities were unique to Hainan, even to accepting place names within the legends as Hainanese when they were quite clearly from the Leizhou-Guangxi border region.\n\nHistorically, Hainan island was one of the later regions to be", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215319, "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-2001", "page_number": 96, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "44\n\ncolonised by ethnic Han Chinese. It was occupied during the reign of Han Wu Di, a century or more before the Christian era, albeit for centuries merely in pockets around the seaboard with the non-Han ethnic groups, mostly Li and Miao, having been pushed back into the hinterland, the central mountainous area,\n\nBeing the southern limit of China the island of Hainan is semi-tropical with early settlers from the Chinese mainland tending to be involuntary settlers, not necessarily outlaws or banished political exiles but colonists despatched by the government who intermarried with the aboriginal Li. Ethnically the Han Chinese stock, referred to as Hainanese for Hoilam in Hainanese], came largely from the province of Fujian, speaking Qiongwen [commonly called Hainanese] a sub-group of Minnan3, though there are also many Cantonese and Hakka Han Chinese within the population and even pockets of pure Cantonese or Hakka Chinese. The result of the hotchpotch of immigration over the centuries is referred to as a whole as Hainanese, and their culture and social mores reflect elements from all of their original ethnic groups. Hainanese people, as would be expected, cannot be differentiated by foreigners from other Han Chinese. However, the Cantonese, the Chaozhou and Fujian Han Chinese are never slow to point a finger at the Hainanese who they claim to be clannish, insular and very suspicious people. Many go as far as to claim that they are slow, dim-witted and gullible, Certainly, they are different though to a non-Chinese the difference is not immediately apparent. My experience is that they are not only friendly but extremely welcoming to foreigners, and especially diligent as house-servants.\n\nHot and remote, it was pioneer frontier territory - far from the capital and major cities, used during dynastic times as a penal colony or at least a refuge for political exile for Chinese officials, a backward area with agriculture and fisheries as the only form of subsistence. The first official was exiled there during the Han, about the time of Christ, though the peak periods of such exiles were during the Song and Ming dynasties, with some like Hai Rui, Su Dongbo and Cao Yu, being renowned throughout China. Fortuitously their presence on the island accelerated the development of cultural life, and when joined by their families and entourages, they left their mark on the culture of Hainan,\n\nAlthough there are guide and travel books about most areas of", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215321, "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-2001", "page_number": 98, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "46\n\nmuddy plats, eventually reached the first \"gun-house,\" as the crumbling fort was known to the Chinese. Finally, the passengers reached the Custom House and on to whatever accommodation they had reserved or could find in this very primitive European backwater.\n\nChinese immigrants from Hainan, along with those from Fujian, Guangxi, and Guangdong, flocked down to the foreign colonies of south-east Asia. Though integrated into the greater Han Chinese population of Singapore and Penang, as well as within towns and cities in North Borneo, Java, and Sumatra, even today Hainanese have remained in one or two linguistic pockets, such as is to be found in the area of Rengam and Kluang in southern Malaysia.\n\nOnly a few of all the Chinese temples visited in South-east Asia have been categorically identified as exclusively founded by Hainanese immigrants. Others, predominantly Hokkien, have a Hainanese altar stuck away in one corner, erected by the few local Hainanese, though two temples stood out, both in southern Malaysia, in which the images of the deities were predominantly uniquely Hainanese, though the temple custodians, the devotees, and the other images were all Hokkien. The picture gained from Hainanese staff and devotees in temples containing uniquely Hainanese images revealed the following minimum of temples being predominantly, if not entirely, Hainanese - six in Singapore, two in Penang, one in Kuala Lumpur, one in Seremban, and two in or near Kluang in southern Malaysia; on Sumatra, one in Medan and two in Palembang; on Java, one in Jakarta, one in Cirebon, and one in Semarang. There are several in Ha Tien in southern Cambodia and others scattered across southern Thailand. The strangest of all was the lone, small Hainanese temple on Bali.\n\nHainanese temple altars bear the usual accoutrements and have the same layout as altars in other Chinese communities, though, to generalise, with less clutter, particularly on altars in Hainanese Huiguan [community club houses]. Major China-wide deities, such as Guan Yin, Guan Gong, Hua Guang, City Gods, Earth Gods, and the Wealth Gods, are the same as in every Chinese community. There are also a number of predominantly Cantonese, Chaozhou, and even Minnan deities in many of the Hainanese temples both in Hainan and in South-east Asia, adopted from other immigrant ethnic groups, including Jinhua Niangniang, Caibo Xingjun, Fazhu Gong, Qi Tian Da Sheng, Longwei.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215353, "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-2001", "page_number": 130, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "78\n\nHainan island as well as within Hainanese communities in south-east Asia. Although their legends are unique to Hainanese they are similar in style and format to those told in other ethnic groups.\n\nSadly, most of the rural temples on Hainan island itself have little left of their original images following the ravages of the Cultural Revolution. It is fortunate that we do still have several Hainanese communities in south-east Asia where little has changed over the past century. However, intermarriage between Hainanese devotees and those of other Han ethnic groups has meant that to identify cults as uniquely Hainanese has become that much more difficult.\n\nNOTES\n\n1\n\n2\n\nPopular or folk religion is an amalgam of Buddhist, Daoist and local beliefs ignored by Confucianists, Buddhists and Daoists as well as by the majority of educated Chinese.\n\nHengwa is sometimes referred to as the Puxian sub-group.\n\nHokkien is the Fujian linguistic group word for Fujian people as well as their language. Minnan is the area of southern Fujian province from which many immigrants to Taiwan and South-east Asia originated and is a linguistic sub-group of Hokkien.\n\n4 Buddhist and Daoist images on such altars have not been included in this article, even though a number have been seen on folk religion altars in Hainanese temples, as they are all revered China-wide.\n\n5 Ma Zu is primarily the Fujian community title for Tian Hou.\n\n7\n\nBoth Third and Fourth are deities that have been noted on Hainan island and within Hainanese overseas communities.\n\nAn entirely different deity, the Saintly Matron of Wenzhou, Wenzhou Shengmu would appear not to be connected in any way with Wenzhou Houwang. Nor has she been noted on altars within the overseas southern Chinese communities. She has only been noted by William Mesny who saw an image of her in Zhejiang province in 1896 [doubtless connected with the local coastal city of Wenzhou], and suggested that as her surname appeared to have been Lin she may well be Tian Hou, the patron goddess of seafarers.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 } ]