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    {
        "id": 210953,
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        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
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        "page_number": 15,
        "title": "RAS-1987",
        "content_text": "CONTENTS\n\nPRESIDENT'S REPORT\n\nHON. TREASURER'S REPORT\n\nHON. LIBRARIAN'S REPORT\n\nOBITUARY: K. M. A. BARNETT\n\nTRANSACTIONS:\n\nJean Chesneaux, China in the Eyes of the French Intellectuals\n\nElizabeth Sinn, Kowloon Walled City: Its Origin and Early History\n\nARTICLES:\n\nAnthony Sweeting, A Middleman for All Seasons: Snapshots of the Significance of Mok Man Cheung and His English Made Easy\n\nLars Ragvald and Graeme Lang, Confused Gods: Huang Daxian (Wong Tai Sin) and Huang Yeren at Mt. Luofu\n\nGraeme Lang and Lars Ragvald, Official and Oral Traditions About Hong Kong's Newest God\n\nDavid W. Mahoney, The British (Protestant) Cemetery at San Pedro, Makati, Manila, Philippines\n\nValery M. Garrett, A Hoklo Wedding\n\nCarl Smith, A Sense of History (Part II)\n\nThe Hong Kong History Project\n\nNOTES AND QUERIES:\n\nAnthony K. K. Siu, Tam Kung: His Legend and Worship\n\nThe Cannon in the Kowloon Walled City\n\nJames Hayes, Hong Kong's Own Boat People\n\nVisit to the Iwataya Department Store, Fukuoka, Japan\n\nNotes on Temples and Shrines, Hong Kong Island\n\nBOOK REVIEWS\n\nvii\n\nxiii\n\nxv\n\n1\n\n11\n\n30\n\n46\n\n74\n\n93\n\n101\n\n112\n\n117\n\n254\n\n278\n\n279\n\n280\n\n283\n\n285\n\n292\n\nPage 15\n\nPage 16",
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    {
        "id": 211038,
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        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
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        "document_key": "RAS-1987",
        "page_number": 99,
        "title": "RAS-1987",
        "content_text": "74\n\nCONFUSED GODS: \n\nHUANG DAXIAN (WONG TAI SIN) AND HUANG YEREN \n\nIntroduction \n\nAT MT. LUOFU \n\nLARS RAGVALD AND GRAEME LANG* \n\n2\n\nSince 1984, we have been studying the history of the cult of Huang Daxian (Wong Tai Sin)1 in Hong Kong and in South China. Initially, our primary concern was to explain the rapid growth in popularity of this god in Hong Kong, but we have also searched for the roots of this cult in Guangdong, where the first author in 1985 discovered the ruins of several temples to Huang Daxian built earlier this century. In the course of this research, we have encountered some intriguing variations in beliefs about this god.\n\n3\n\nIn a separate paper, we describe two cases where oral accounts regarding the god Huang Daxian differ sharply from the official accounts published by the Sese Yuan (Sik Sik Yuen), the organization which manages the god's temple in Kowloon.† Both of these oral accounts seem to have been borrowed from other local traditions, a process familiar to students of folklore. Conditions such as those which can be found in Hong Kong may favour this kind of mixing and mingling of traditions, all the more so as there are few traditions about the god Huang Daxian which are widely known.\n\nIn more recent research in China, we have observed further instances of the mingling of traditions about the god Huang Daxian.* Many people in Guangdong province are aware of the\n\nLars Ragvald teaches at the Institute of Oriental Languages at the University of Stockholm, Sweden and Graeme Lang at Sir Wilfred Grenfell College, Memorial University, Canada.\n\n+ Editor's note: \"Official and oral traditions about Hong Kong's newest god”, at pp. 93-99 of this issue of the journal, was originally scheduled for earlier publication. The editor regrets any inconvenience to the authors caused by the delay.",
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    {
        "id": 211051,
        "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",
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        "document_key": "RAS-1987",
        "page_number": 112,
        "title": "RAS-1987",
        "content_text": "87\n\nNOTES\n\n“Wong Tai Sin” is the most common transliteration in Hong Kong of the god's name. The pinyin transliteration is Huang Daxian. For Chinese names with a conventional Hong Kong transliteration which differs from the pinyin form, we will begin with the pinyin forms followed by the Hong Kong forms within brackets. For names and places in China, and for subsequent references to Chinese names and terms used in Hong Kong (except for place names such as Hong Kong and Kowloon), only pinyin system will be used.\n\nOn the reasons for the growth in popularity of Huang Daxian in Hong Kong, especially since the late 1940's, see Graeme Lang, and Lars Ragvald, “Upward mobility of a refugee god: Hong Kong's Huang Daxian,\" The Stockholm Journal of East Asian Studies. Vol, 1, 1988. We have called Huang Daxian the “refugee god” both because his cult was imported into Hong Kong early in this century during a period of persecution of traditional religion in China, and also because the god's success can be attributed in part to the refugees who flooded into the area around the temple in the late 1940's. Key decisions made by the management of the temple were also very important.\n\nOur discoveries regarding the ruined temples to Huang Daxian in Guangdong, and a second visit to these sites in 1987, will be reported in a forthcoming article.\n\nThere are undoubtedly many intriguing stories about Huang Daxian which could be collected by researchers in Guangdong province. For instance, one story connecting Huang Daxian to legends about the founding of Guangzhou was related to the first author by the manager of a local company near Guangzhou, who as a child had played in an old Huang Daxian temple in the Fangcun area (on which, see the first author's forthcoming paper). According to this story, Huang Chuping of the Jin dynasty had found the way (Tao) and become a saint at Mt. Luofu. He then, it is said, shouted at five pieces of hard rock turning them into five fairy-sheep and also ordered five fairies dressed in red, yellow, blue, white and black respectively to drive the sheep. This unlikely flock descended in the midst of Guangzhou. Huang Daxian then chanted, \"I wish that Guangzhou from now on shall enjoy bumper harvests, timely wind and rain, be prosperous and at peace, and never suffer famine or disaster”. This tale was related as explaining the origin of the old names Wuyang Cheng (City of the five sheep) and Suicheng (Ear of grain city). The story is clearly modeled on the old (documented) tales of the five saints on ram-back who brought the five ears of grain to Guangzhou. It is not clear where the manager got his story, but it may have been stimulated by an obscure phrase on one of the pillars of the main gate of the old Fangcun Huang Daxian temple. In any case, we expect that there are many such tales which remain to be uncovered. The versatile Huang Daxian, with his several incarnations and his ability to absorb stories from other traditions, may continue to surprise students of his cult for years to come. In the present paper, however, we focus only on his merger with another Taoist figure at Mt. Luofu.\n\n5 Several cases of apparently similar confusion or merging of legendary Taoist figures on the basis of similar surnames have been documented in S.H. Wong. “A study of Huang Ta-hsien [Daxian].” The Journal of the Institute of Chinese Studies of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, XVI, 1985, pp. 223-239.\n\nMt. Luofu, some 100 kilometres northeast of Guangzhou, is historically the most important site in the history of Taoist worship and practice in Guangdong province.",
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    {
        "id": 211052,
        "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",
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        "document_key": "RAS-1987",
        "page_number": 113,
        "title": "RAS-1987",
        "content_text": "88\n\nOur principal concern has been to document and explain the rapid growth in popularity in Hong Kong since the 1940's of the cult of Huang Daxian (on which, see Lang and Ragvald, \"Upward mobility of a refugee god\"). However, we have also been trying to trace the origins of the cult in Guangdong province, hence the research trip to the village. A report on this visit, and on the first author's initial visit to the village in 1985, has also been prepared. We are now working on a book on the history of the cult in Guangdong and Hong Kong.\n\nProbable cases of the mergings of deities include, from ancient Greece, the merging of two incarnations of Zeus (Gilbert, Murray, Five stages of Greek Religion, Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday Anchor Books, 1951, p. 48; H.J. Rose, Religion in Greece and Rome, N.Y., Harper and Row, 1959, pp. 48-49), and of various female deities in Aphrodite (Paul Friedrich, The Meaning of Aphrodite, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1978, ch. 2); from Rome, the blending of Roman with Greek deities, and the subsequent apparent merging of some Roman deities with Celtic deities (John Ferguson, The Religions of the Roman Empire, Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press, 1970, pp. 211-220); from the early Christian era, the probable absorption of elements of the cult of Diana into the cult of Mary (Herbert Muller, The Loom of History, N.Y. New American Library, 1958 p. 173; Durant, 1939: 183); from Mexico, the absorption of elements of the Indian goddess Tonantsi into the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe (Ena Campbell, “The Virgin of Guadalupe and the female self-image: a Mexican case history\", in Mother Worship: Themes and Variations, ed. by Richard Preston, University of North Carolina Press, 1982).\n\n9 This translation strangely enough contains one serious (the failure to recognize Dongtian Fudi [Cavern-heavens and blessed spots] as a general Taoist concept) and a few smaller mistakes. These, however, do not affect the arguments made in this paper.\n\n10 This probable origin of the autobiography was pointed out to us by Dr. S.H. Wong of the Department of Chinese, Hong Kong University (see Wong, \"A study of Huang Ta-hsien\").\n\nThere are several slightly different versions of Shenxian Zhuan. For this translation we have used the relatively early (Song dynasty) version in Biji Xiaoshuo Daguan (A Parade of Note-form Fiction), Taibei, Xinxing Shuju, volume 4. 12 Essentially the same story is related in Huitu Liexian Quanzhuan, compiled in the 16th century by Wang Shizhen (reprinted by Zhongwen Chubanshe in 1971 on Taiwan). This is one of the major reference works on Taoist saints, with capsule biographies on some 500 of them, and covers the entire period from the beginning of Taoism until the last year of the reign of Hongzhi (1506 A.D.). This source adds only the information that during the Song and Yuan dynasties, both Huang Chuping and his brother were awarded honorary titles by the state. The story of Huang Chuping also appears in Jinhua Fuzhi (the prefectural gazetteer of Jinhua), volume no. 22 in the subsection \"xian shi\" (on fairies).\n\n13\n\nGe Hong was a native of Jurong in Danyang (present day Jiangsu province). His career included service as assistant to prime minister Sima Rui, and as counsellor and military staff officer. He was honoured by the state for his services in the suppression of the peasant revolt led by Shi Bing. However, he was also very interested in Taoist alchemy. He was a grandson, on the fraternal line, of the famous necromancer and alchemist Ge Xuan (164-244), and from a disciple of Ge Xuan's, he learned the art of refining cinnabar. When word spread that cinnabar sand had been found in Jiaozhi (the ancient name for part of Guangdong and",
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    {
        "id": 211053,
        "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",
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        "document_key": "RAS-1987",
        "page_number": 114,
        "title": "RAS-1987",
        "content_text": "89\n\nNorthern Vietnam) he asked to be relieved of office and left the capital for Guangzhou. In 327 he settled in the Zhuming cave of Mt. Luofu where he busied himself collecting medicinal herbs and refining cinnabar. His extensive writings include several important treatises on Taoism and Chinese medicine. (Source: Zongjiao Cidian [Dictionary of religion], Shanghai, Cishu Chubanshe (Lexiographical publishing company), 1981, pp. 997-998; see also Jin Shu [The Book of Jin], volume 72, Zhonghua Shuju). Needham calls him \"the greatest alchemist in Chinese history\" (Science and Civilization in China, vol. II, Cambridge University Press, 1956, p. 437).\n\n14 The story that Huang Yeren was late for the levitation because he was drunk, we heard from a young official of a local Taoist organization whom we interviewed in Guangzhou on August 27, 1987. Cultural affairs cadres whom we interviewed at the main temple on Mt. Luofu on August 28, 1987 indignantly denied this story. The young official also related the story that Huang Yeren (Huang the wild man) had originally been called Huang \"also [in Cantonese “yah”] man” (in many Luofu folk-tales the Yeren is said to appear in the shape of an animal). Later the character for \"also\" (in Mandarin “ye”) had been substituted by that for \"wild\" (in Mandarin also \"ye\"). We have not found any documentary sources which confirm this information.\n\n19 Michel, Soymié, \"Le Lo-feou chan\", 1954. Bulletin de l'école française d'Extrême-orient, Tome XLVIII (ler semestre), 1954, pp. 1-137, raises another possibility (see pp. 109-110): that the Yeren tradition is based on contacts in ancient times, possibly including periodic trading exchanges, between people of the plains of Guangdong and aborigines living on or near the mountain. In the eyes of the plainsmen, the aborigines would appear strange in many respects, especially in speech and appearance. Stories derived from these contacts might have become the basis for the Yeren legend. Supporting this interpretation, Soymié notes, is the fact that Yeren was thought to be able to appear as a man or a woman, a young person or an old person, and that Yeren is in fact a category of \"strange person apparitions” rather than a single figure. Clearly, once such a flexible figure had become established in the popular imagination, sightings of almost anything on the mountain could feed into the growing folklore about Yeren.\n\n16 Some stories of healings by Yeren are contained in Luofushan Fengwuzhi (Records of Mt. Luofu scenery), Guangdong Lüyou Chubanshe (Tourist affairs publishing co., 1984). This source also records the tradition that the cave of Yeren was guarded by a mute tiger. The chapter in which the healings are recorded is titled, \"The earth-bound fairy riding on a mute tiger.\"\n\n17 Source: Nanhan Shu (The book of Southern Han), Guangdong Renmin Chubanshe, 1981 (reprint), volume 17. This story was also related to Ragvald by scholars of the provincial Wenshi Guan (Research institute of culture and history) whom the first author interviewed in Guangzhou, September, 1987.\n\n18 These details are in notes provided to the first author by the Wenshi Guan scholars (see previous footnote), and were evidently taken by them from an addition to the Nanhan Shu, titled Nanhan Shu Kao Yi (Collating the variants), volume 17.\n\n19 We have not yet been able to verify the exact location of the temple, which apparently is called Huangxianweng miao (The temple of old saint Huang). There may be several other Huang Li temples in this region.\n\n20 According to Nanhan Shu Kao Yi (volume 17) his original name may have been Wang rather than Huang. Evidently he changed his surname to Huang (in Canton...",
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    {
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        "page_number": 118,
        "title": "RAS-1987",
        "content_text": "93\n\nOFFICIAL AND ORAL TRADITIONS ABOUT HONG KONG'S NEWEST GOD\n\nGRAEME LANG AND LARS RAGVALD\n\nSince the 1940's an ancient Taoist immortal now known as 'Wong Tai Sin' has become one of the most popular gods in Hong Kong. In researching the social history of the god's major temple in Kowloon, (see Lang and Ragvald, 1988) we encountered two types of stories about the god and his temple. The first type, the official history published by the group which manages the temple, is grounded in certain obscure classical texts. The second type of story is the oral traditions circulating among believers. We were surprised to discover cases where there was little or no connection between official and oral accounts. Two cases are described to illustrate how motifs of story elements from other sources had been drawn into the oral versions. We will also try to explain the occasional wide disparities between official and oral accounts.\n\n2\n\nIn the first case, the authors were interviewing an elderly Cantonese lady to probe her knowledge of the history of the major Wong Tai Sin temple in Kowloon. She had seemed likely to be a good subject. Like the founders of the temple she was formerly in the herbal medicine business, and had operated a shop in Guangzhou (Canton) before moving to Kowloon, where she lived for a time near the Wong Tai Sin temple. She related to us that the original statue of Wong Tai Sin had been miraculously washed into the Pearl River during a natural disaster which severely damaged the temple in Guangdong. The statue was swept down the river to Hong Kong, and then miraculously recovered from the sea and made the object of worship. This oral legend is quite different from the official account published by the organization which has managed the temple since 1921. This official account holds that the original image of the god was a picture, rather than a statue; that it was brought down from Guangdong by the founders of the temple in 1915 and placed in a small shrine on Hong Kong Island, and that it was subsequently transported to Kowloon when the temple was moved there in 1921. There is no statue of the god at the modern temple. This official account was written by persons",
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    {
        "id": 211062,
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        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
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        "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.",
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    {
        "id": 211063,
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        "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.",
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        "page_number": 334,
        "title": "RAS-1987",
        "content_text": "觀天九\n\nPlate 9. Ragvald (with daughter Suzanne) and Lang with Mr. Zhang Zongquan. the presiding Taoist at the Jiutian Guan, near Luofushan.\n\nThe gentleman in the white jacket, who works at the Chongxu Guan, introduced us to Mr. Zhang.\n\nPlate 10. Image of \"Red Pine Huang Daxian\" at the Chongxu Guan, Luotushan.",
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