[ { "id": 211058, "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-1987", "page_number": 119, "title": "RAS-1987", "content_text": "94\n\nassociated with the organization after interviewing the surviving founders in the 1960's, and there is no reason to question its veracity. Where, then, did the old lady's account come from?\n\nFirst, it should be noted that few people who visit the temple are even aware of the name of the private organization which has managed the temple for the past 60 years (Chin, et al., 1977:29). Fewer still will have read the temple's history, written in Chinese in glossy brochures which are provided mainly to the members, government officials, and other dignitaries on ceremonial occasions. Hence, it is not surprising that details of the founding of the temple are not widely known even among devotees of the god. How then do worshippers account for the temple's origins?\n\nIn this particular case, the informant appears to have adopted a miracle story which is not uncommon in the Hong Kong area: the recovery from the sea of a god's statue. The statue of Pak Tai in the temple of Cheung Chau island, near Hong Kong, for instance, was allegedly found by fishermen floating in the sea off Guangdong, and became the object of worship (Savidge, 1977:82), displacing other statues of the god. Another instance has been related by adherents of the Kuan-yin temple near Tai Ping Shan Street on Hong Kong Island, in which the statue of the goddess displayed in the temple was “carved from a block of wood floating in the sea and, according to the local story, giving off mysterious golden rays” (Topley and Hayes, 1966:126). The main icon in the Tin Hau temple at Shek Tong Tsui on Hong Kong Island was also said to have been recovered from the sea (Hayes, 1966:89). This kind of story is superficially similar to the “drifted deities” worshipped by fishermen in the Noto Peninsula area of Japan (Ogura, 1980). Many worshippers in Hong Kong will have heard this kind of story about a god's statue being recovered from the sea. When many years have passed, it is difficult for some people to remember which god's statue was found in the water. One's favourite god may then become the subject of the story.\n\nAnother case we have discovered suggests that the process of transfer can occur quite rapidly. In 1966, in a paper on temples on Hong Kong Island, Topley related the account given her by a Cantonese lady of the life of the Taoist hermit worshipped in", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211062, "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-1987", "page_number": 123, "title": "RAS-1987", "content_text": "98\n\nNOTES\n\nResearch for this paper was carried out in Hong Kong in the Spring of 1984. We would like to thank John Dolfin, Director of the Universities Service Centre, for the use of that invaluable facility during our research, and John Ashton of Memorial University for some helpful suggestions. Parts of the paper were included in a presentation at a colloquium of the Sociology Department, Hong Kong University, May, 1984.\n\n1 \"Wong Tai Sin\" is the most common transliteration in Hong Kong of the god's name. The pinyin transliteration is Huang Daxian. Here, the common Hong Kong transliterations are used, except for place-names in China such as Guangzhou (Canton), Guangdong (Kwangtung), and Chejiang.\n\n2 The cases to be described are here termed motifs in the sense used by Allen and Montell (1981:38-9), who note that \"the characteristic feature of these migratory narrative elements is their transferability among stories about different events or persons.\"\n\n3 This is the only Wong Tai Sin temple known to most believers in Hong Kong, and the prominence of the god in Hong Kong has occurred entirely as a result of the success, for various historical reasons, of this one temple. There is also a private Wong Tai Sin temple in Kowloon, as well as a small private shrine in Macau, but they have had no influence on the popularity of the god.\n\nbut\n\nSome temples in Guangzhou were indeed destroyed early in this century by Nationalists rather than by the elements (see for instance Rhoads, 1975:255). Perhaps our informant's account of the destruction of the temple was a tradition dating back to these events.\n\n5 The fact that the icon of the god brought to Hong Kong from Guangdong is a picture rather than a statue suggests, as we argue in another paper (Lang and Ragvald, 1988), that the god was worshipped in Guangdong as the patron god of a family herbal medicine business (see Day, 1969, on these \"paper gods\" and their role in family worship).\n\nThe organization which manages the temple, the Sik Sik Yuen, has published the official history of the temple in commemorative brochures, especially: Sik Sik Yuen, 1971; 1981; 1982,\n\n7 Ogura (1980) argues that the drifted deity tradition evolved from an earlier tradition of belief in periodic visits by gods from their abodes beyond the sea. There is no such tradition in the Hong Kong area.\n\n1 The temple's version of the Taoist hermit's life on earth before he became a god is in the form of a short autobiography, supposedly dictated by the god to a Taoist. It appears on a plaque in the temple, and also in brochures published by the Sik Sik Yuen. It has been discovered by Dr. Shiu-hon Wong of Hong Kong University that this account follows closely a capsule biography of the hermit written in the 4th century A.D. as part of the collection \"Biographies of Immortals\", by Ge Hong. This literary version holds that the Taoist hermit Wong, while herding sheep in Chejiang province, discovered a method of achieving immortality. He also manifested his power by turning a hillside of boulders into sheep. These two achievements figure prominently in the temple's \"autobiography\" of the god.\n\nThe story of a saint whose body remains uncorrupted and even sweet-smelling long after burial is a common motif in Christian legends. Loomis (1948:54) cites about two hundred instances.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211063, "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-1987", "page_number": 124, "title": "RAS-1987", "content_text": "99\n\nREFERENCES\n\nAllen, Barbara, and William L. Montell\n\n1981 From Memory to History: Using Oral Sources in Local Historical Research. Nashville: The American Association For State and Local History.\n\nChin, Margaret, et al.\n\n1977 Religion and Organization: A Study of the Temple of Wong Tai Sin. Department of Sociology, Hong Kong University.\n\nDay, Clarence Burton\n\n1969 Chinese Peasant Cults. (2nd edition) Taipei: Ch'eng Wen Publishing Co.\n\nHayes, James\n\n1966 \"Chinese Temples in the Local Setting\". In Some Traditional Chinese Ideas and Conceptions in Hong Kong Social Life Today, pp. 86-95. Hong Kong: The Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society.\n\nLang, Graeme, and Lars Ragvald\n\n1988 \"Upward Mobility of a Refugee God: Hong Kong's Huang Daxian”. Stockholm Journal of East Asian Studies. vol. 1, 54-87.\n\nLoomis, C. Grant\n\n1948 White Magic: An Introduction to the Folklore of Christian Legend. Cambridge, Mass.: The Mediaeval Academy of America.\n\nOgura, Manabu\n\n1980 Drifted Deities in the Noto Peninsula. In Studies in Japanese Folklore, ed. Richard M. Dorson, pp. 133-44. New York: Arno Press.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522", "rank": 0 } ]