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HEROLD J. WIENS

of south China that have evolved a significant culture. But precisely because of this and because they occupied irrigable valley lands, the Han Chinese came into conflict with them. Moreover, because of superior culture, technology and number, the Han gradually took over the T'ai states of the Yangtze valley and assimilated their populations. Those among the T'ai leadership who escaped Han political and cultural conquests were the ones who led their following in migration away from the front of contact. The direction of this slow historical flight was southward and southwestward,

Before the Han Chinese conquest under the Ch'in dynasty (Third century B.C.), south China contained 6-8 large T'ai states. In Szechwan the T'ai state of Shu was centered on the present provincial capital of Ch'eng-tu. The Pa state was centered at Chungking. In the central and lower Yangtze region were the T'ai states of Ch'u and Wu respectively. The T'ai state of Nan-yueh included such areas as the Canton delta and the Red river delta of Tongking. In Fukien were the Pai-yueh, sometimes politically centralized at Foochow. All of these were absorbed into the political body of China during the 400 years of the Han dynasties. Sinicization, however, took many more centuries and reached its greatest flowering in the Canton delta region during the T'ang period. West of this region in the Yunnan-Kweichow plateaus, however, a Sinicized T'ai power lingered on through the T'ang and Sung periods in the state of Nan-chao, at times strong enough to pose threats to the stability of the T'ang empire. The successor to this state, Ta-li, withered under the Mongol onslaught directed by Kublai Khan, and T'ai political genius moved across the southern borders of Yunnan into the Mon-Khmer cultural sphere in the basin of the Chao Phya river where it evolved the present state of Thailand.

7

T'ai autonomy within southwest China continued in smaller units in the lake and river basins of Yunnan near the Burma borders until the Communist conquest of China. The reasons for the extended freedom from close Han Chinese control over the southwest include the rough topography of the region with agriculture restricted to small basins or primitive self-sufficiency

Ch'en Pi-sheng, T'ien-pien san-yi (Reflections on the Yunnan borderlands), Chungking, 1941, 21-24.
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NOTES AND QUERIES 

and symbolises pledge of Salvation or Nirvana. (Other Buddhist emblems and symbols often used in a similar way on bowls of this type are the sea-shell, the wheel and, above all, the vajra). Both the potting and decoration of these bowls point to the last years of the 15th century or very early 16th century.

The discovery of these blue and white bowls removes an apparent anomaly in the Ming archaeology of Hong Kong that is, if it can be said to exist at all. Previously, the only type of Ming pottery found in Hong Kong was a high-fired stoneware with an olive green glaze and a greyish body2, whereas the much more common blue and white porcelain had not been found at all.

The blue and white bowls provide the clue to the dating of the earthenware jars which are of a type not uncommonly found in the New Territories especially in the areas of Yuen Long and Sek Kong. These jars are generally of globular shape with wide shoulders, thin walls and a porous buff-coloured body with a brown slip coating on the outside. There are usually three or more lug-handles on the shoulder. Similar jars, dating from Sung to Ming, have been found near Canton, especially near Fat Shan where these pots were probably made3. Most of them have been found in cremation burial pits as containers for ashes or grave goods. These jars usually have covers of the same material and the covered jar, when used as ash containers, is often in turn placed inside a bigger covered jar or two large basins (one covering the other). It is thus most likely that the present jars and covers were used for similar purposes.

It is interesting to note that in recent excavations of a burial site in Pila, Laguna (Southern Luzon) in the Philippines, secondary cremation burials, with stoneware jars and covers, were found in the cultural layer which has been dated by C14 to the late 14th century or early 15th century, i.e. late Yuan or early Ming. Another point to observe is the question of whether the Shek Pik pots were broken deliberately at the time of the burial or by accident at a later date. In the excavations in the Philippines, large stoneware jars containing charcoal and charred fragments of human skeleton were often found smashed. The same phenomenon was also recently found in Thailand. According to the report on the Thai excavations, the practice of smashing pots in
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RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1974
https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/x633mp077
The Monuments of Vientiane and Luang Prabang

Michael Smithies*

The second international tour organized by the Royal Asiatic Society, Hong Kong Branch, went over the Chinese (Lunar) New Year 1974 to Laos. 41 members and their guests visited Vientiane and Luang Prabang from 23 to 27 January, flying directly between Hong Kong and the Laotian capital. Some persons on the tour went ahead to visit Chiengmai in Thailand or Vat Phu in southern Laos and joined up with the main group later.

The attractions of the monuments of Vientiane, the administrative capital of the Kingdom of Laos, are slight in comparison to those in the royal capital of Luang Prabang. This is less a reflection of the religious fervour or artistic sensibility of the inhabitants of Vientiane, but a proof of the efficiency of the Siamese sack of the city in 1828 as a reprisal for Chao Anou's attempted attack on Bangkok two years previously and his subsequent alliance with Hué.

Vientiane's position in relation to Luang Prabang is ambivalent. Luang Prabang was the original capital of the Kingdom of Lane Xang (a million elephants) which was founded in 1353 by Fa Ngum, the son of a Lao chief who had been in exile in Angkor. King Potisarat moved the capital to Vientiane in 1520 and it was from the more central position of the kingdom, which then included much of the territory now in northeast Thailand, that the most famous Lao monarch, Souligna Vongsa, ruled from 1637-1694. On his death, however, the kingdom split into three, not counting the semi-independent existence of Xieng Khouang in the northeast: Vientiane, in alliance with Burma and a vassal of Annam; Luang Prabang, which at first drew support from China and later Siam; and in the south Champassak, which drew ever closer to Siam. The devastation of Vientiane by the Siamese in 1828 and the elimination of the line of Vientiane left in the centre a power vacuum, which the...

Mr. Smithies, at the time of this visit and report, Lecturer in French at the University of Hong Kong, was Secretary of the Hong Kong Branch 1972-73 and Councillor until his departure from the Colony in 1974. He organized and led this visit to Laos.
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NOTES AND QUERIES 

201 

It would seem incongruous that Na T'o, a Muslim who would abhor idolatry, should be venerated by the Chinese and it would be interesting to know what the Malays themselves would think of such a practice; that is of course, assuming that they even know of his existence. The Chinese, however, see no incongruity in having a Muslim on their altar, and in some areas, particularly around Kluang, he is especially treated with the respect and constraints due to another religion. As a Muslim, he is never disturbed on a Friday and never offered pork. 

The only other case so far noted of a Muslim appearing on a Chinese altar was heard from a Chinese from Sian who recalled a deity in North China, the Wei Wei Ts'ai Shen (✯✯1⁄2§i†), said to be the Mohammedan god of wealth, depicted dressed in a Tibetan high-crowned cap. Wei Wei, he thought, was probably derived from the Arabic, and, it was claimed that Muslim Chinese offered beef at his altar. Wei Wei however, is possibly a local variant of Hui Hui, the usual Chinese term for "Moslem”. 

The second cult is that of Miss Lin (✯✯✯) whose image is to be seen on Chinese temple altars only in Southern Thailand. Her legend explains all. Left alone by the death of her parents in her home village near Ch'aochou in Eastern Kwangtung province of South China, she followed her only living relative, her brother, down to a village near Songkla in the far south of Thailand where he worked in the fields. When she arrived she found to her disgust that her brother was just about to marry a Muslim girl and be converted to Islam. She attempted without avail to persuade him not to do either. A Chinese god carver in Bangkok added, with disgust, he even gave up eating pork! 

The sister knew she could not live with her brother and his wife and in a desperate moment threw herself into the river Patani and drowned herself. The brother, despite being filled with remorse, to demonstrate that he, as a convert, was more devout than born believer, went ahead with his plan to build a mosque and even went as far as to bury his sister beside the site chosen for it. As the last brick was laid lightning struck and destroyed the mosque without harming the sister's grave. However, the brother refused to believe that it was divine retribution for his denial of his parent's gods. Twice more he built, and twice more lightning struck. Only then did he accept the message and renounce Islam. Realizing that his
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NOTES AND QUERIES

sister, now a spirit, had proffered good advice, he built a folk religion shrine in her honour. Her cult thrived, so much so that her image is revered by Ch'aochou emigrants in most areas of South Thailand and, so the story goes, also in Singapore and in Nakorn Sri Thammarat.

The Bangkok god carver claims that Miss Lin is the only Chinese deity with a special urn donated by the King of Thailand who is well known for his tolerance towards and encouragement for other religions. He is said to have bowed in her honour before her image which consists of a simple, seated country girl with bare feet and large hands, dressed in working clothes Plate 3. Her festival is celebrated in her temples each year on her birthday, the 15th of the first lunar month.

Hong Kong.

March, 1980.

KEITH STEVENS

THE TEMPLE OF THE SUPREME RULER,

NEAR SUNG WONG TOI, KOWLOON*

In the thirteenth century A.D. the Southern Sung Emperor Tuen Chung was attacked by the Mongol Conquerors of the North. Driven from his provisional capital at Hang Chow, the Emperor retreated southwards through Fukien and on to Kwangtung province, stopping temporarily at more than 30 places on his way. Besides the well known Palace at Ngai Mun in the San Wui district of Kwangtung, that at Sau Shan by the Pearly River has been fully described in the Imperial Records which were published in the Yuen Dynasty. Such buildings provide evidence of the efforts of the Sung Emperor and his ministers to make that stand against their enemies which has long been cherished in the people's minds.

In the spring of 1277 during the second year of his reign, the Emperor left Kam Tsz Mun of Wai Chau district in Kwangtung and reached Mui Wai. In the fourth moon he arrived at Kwun Fu Cheung, a district which included present day Kowloon, the New

*This heading and the following text are taken from a memorial tablet erected in the Urban Council's Rest Garden at Lomond Road, Kowloon, site of this former old temple. A Chinese tablet is also provided.
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RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1979
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Plate 2. A stone tablet dedicated to Na Ta Kung in a wayside Chinese shrine at the edge of a rubber estate near Kulai in Johore.

Plate 3. An image of Miss Lin on an altar in a Chinese temple in Nakorn Sri Thammarat in Southern Thailand.
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RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1986
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to a significant general trend in the recent development of the national minorities. If economic liberalisation continues, it is possible that this will lead to a reduction in the type of religious revivalism described above, since this has already occurred in the Dai areas of the Xishuangbanna.

It was Mao Zedong who first defined the nationalities question as a class struggle, and under Mao that the policy of allowing the minorities to develop at their own level was first outlined. It is clear that relations of class have not disappeared, either between the national minorities and the Han population, between national minorities themselves, or within particular ethnic groups. The questions which are likely to prove useful for future research on the national minorities of China, both for Chinese and for foreign researchers, are, therefore, the effects of state policies of economic liberalisation and ethnic unit classification on local distinctions of class and ethnicity, and the precise role of religious and cultural factors in this process.

NOTES

1

3

1 MILE = 1/15 ha.

Terms in parentheses refer to self-appellations.

My fieldwork among the Hmong of Thailand was conducted from April 1981 to October 1982 with the assistance of the Social Science Research Council and the Central Research Fund of the Univ. of London.

The Third Plenary Session of the Party's 11th Central Committee was held in 1978.

REFERENCES

Cohen, A. Custom and Politics in Urban Africa (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1969).

Fei, Hsiao-tung. 'Ethnic Identification in China': Social Sciences in China, March 1980.

Fitzgerald, C.P. The Southern Expansion of the Chinese People (Barrie and Jenkins, London 1972).
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RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1994
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considered desirable for unsightly power lines and, what many maintain are, harmful cables to be festooned from poles or pylons across the landscape. The complaints by residents of Fei Ngo Shan (Kowloon Peak) in 1995, to the Hong Kong Government and China Light and Power Company, are a case in point.

China resisted similar developments in the late 19th century, including the building of railroads, because it felt these 'improvements' could spoil favourable fung shui. Lin Yutang humorously writes (Lin, 1936:302): 'Has not fung shui contributed more to aesthetic life than it has hindered our knowledge of geology? Certainly 'progress' in China was delayed as a result of fung shui precautions, but, interestingly, relatively no such delays were experienced in Japan,

Fung Shui Overseas

When Chinese emigrate it is understandable that some find it unsettling to be surrounded by the foreign customs and values of the logic-led West. Consequently, there is sometimes a natural reaction of nostalgia, a desire for awareness of Chinese culture to be heightened and for some Chinese beliefs like fung shui to be retained. Years ago, the so-called naam yeung (southern ocean) Chinese transported fung shui to places like Malaya, Singapore, and Thailand. Still today, many try to re-create 'a little piece of Hong Kong' (or wherever they came from) in the country in which they have settled. In addition, many try to convince themselves that, if something is Chinese, it must be better.

Fung shui as practised in Europe can differ slightly from the 'classical' model of Hong Kong, although the basic principles remain the same. There are only a handful of Chinese fung shui masters currently active in Britain, although the number is increasing. Nevertheless, a Chinese estate agent living in England informed the author that up to 80 per cent of her Chinese clients who buy property there are concerned about fung shui. Eighty per cent, however, is a very approximate figure, and it appears to the author it could be on the high side. Customers are generally concerned with points such as the orientation of the property and how the bed can be positioned. But things like Tung Sing (the Chinese Almanac) mean little to many second-generation British Chinese as they are unable to interpret it properly. One Chinese woman academic, a member of one of the Five Great Clans of Hong Kong's New Territories, who has lived mainly in...
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RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-2000
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Celestial Stems, in the form of the Five Planetary deities, and the other five their counterparts according to the Five Elements. As an example we shall look at just one of the Five Planetary deities, the first stem, Jia, together with its counterpart humanised form the element Wood. The individual Planetary deity portrayed, Jia, is carrying a dish of peaches and is identified as Jupiter. This is the same deity as the one seen elsewhere with the small arms and hands emerging from the eye-sockets. A second wall dedicated to the Lord of the Southern Dipper, Nan Dou Xingjun, depicts the other Five Planetary deities and their counterparts.

Reverence of, and Ritual and Sacrifice to Taisui

Each of the sixty Taisui is a guardian of the individual year, and is regarded as the deity in charge of his particular year responsible for the happiness of mankind, and for births and deaths during that year. Chinese place their offerings on the altar before or under the image of Taisui bearing their cyclic year-date of their birth. When such cyclical characters are used they are interpreted from a chart held by the temple keeper who is able to read off the year. In the City God temple in Yau Ma Ti in Jiulong, each of the sixty images which stand in serried rows down a side wall, is an identifiable deity but without its individual name or title being displayed. In Chinese folk religion temples in both Cambodia and Thailand, Taisui is presented with offerings 30 days after the safe birth of a child to ensure that a full life span is pre-ordained. In several of the Macau temples, slips of red paper have been pasted above each of the sixty images identifying the year and title of each of the Taisui. In other places, a number of characters on the front face of the base of each image identify which year of the sixty-year cycle the particular image represents, and in two temples at least, presumably for simplicity's sake, the number of the year is clearly written in ordinary characters.

In Hong Kong and South-east Asia, devotees place placatory offerings of spirit money under the image which bears the two characters for their year of birth of the sixty in the cycle, together with an oral request for a good year. Such piles of paper spirit money are a sure identification of the Taisui cult. These wads of "hell" paper money, either printed notes on the Bank of Hell25 or gold paper "ingots"26 [sheets representing offerings of precious metal], are placed beneath
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muddy 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.

Chinese 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.

Only 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.

Hainanese 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.
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by the Hainanese and especially those from the Hainanese county of Wanning where he is primarily prayed to by the sick. He is claimed to be extremely efficacious and able to cure or heal any sickness or injury. He usually sends his Black or White Horse Generals to help devotees and only leaves the Heavens himself for very important cases. His image has only been seen in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Borneo, Bangkok and Phnom Penh where his festival is generally celebrated on the 15th of the fifth lunar month. However, he must never be prayed to for prosperity.

Two entirely different legends describe the origins of this deity, one more popular in Singapore and southern Malaysia, and the other in Thailand and Cambodia. In neither is the Marquis identified by name and he therefore remains unidentified.

He is also referred to as:

the Lord of the Seas, Wenzhou Haizhu Houwang

Tongzhu Houwang The Marquis Lord of the Aboriginal People

Shanqin Houwang The Imperial Marquis of the Mountains

The first legend claims that a petty king in China was waved by an individual who, in the city of Wenzhou on the coast of Zhejiang province, north of and nearly opposite the island of Taiwan, was awarded the title of Marquis. This happened a long, long time ago. The ruler of Hainan, as a separate state, so the legend continued, had an image of the Marquis brought to the island of Hainan and placed in a specially built temple where he has been worshipped ever since.

The second story relates that the Marquis was, variously, a Ming governor of Hainan island or a minister of an ancient dynasty against whom, through jealousy, evil ministers plotted. They killed him and threw his body into the sea where it turned into a log and floated away. A fisherman found it, realised that it had spiritual properties and so carved it into a statue which he revered and quickly became wealthy,

Page 105

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not orthodox spirits shen

but dark spirits. Yinshen, the ghosts of those who have died a violent death before their due date.

Chinese usually describe this group, in English, as the 108 Martyrs. They are never portrayed as images and tend to be regarded more as public worthies, folk hero "ethnic group" ancestors rather than deities. The tablet is very similar to the ancestral tablet and simply states that it is the 'Tablet to the One Hundred and Eight Brothers'. It is venerated and although the spirits of the brothers are occasionally asked for advice by devotees they are not usually prayed to for major requests or protection, although in Java in one temple the tablet was prayed to by seafarers before they set out on a long journey. Their festival, simple and not in any way lavish, is generally celebrated on the 15th day of the tenth lunar month, though in Singapore it is held on the 3rd of the eighth lunar month.

The question is, who were the One Hundred and Eight Brothers? Three separate versions of the story of their demise have each been recounted with great solemnity, conviction and confidence by temple keepers in Java, Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia, and even in a Chinese temple in Bali. In Penang the story centres on a junk-load of Hainanese immigrants heading for South-east Asia which never arrived. One version claims that they were mistaken for pirates and wiped out by the 'French' [sic] navy off Annam or the 'British' off Malaya again having been mistaken for pirates. Another version suggests that they were all drowned during a typhoon off the southern tip of what is now Vietnam, and yet another that they were annihilated by Chinese government forces off the Leizhou peninsular immediately north of Hainan when, again, they were mistaken for pirates.12 The third story is that they were the original immigrants from Fujian province who arrived in Hainan to settle but all died in Hainan from disease or at the hands of the aborigines. A twist to the version heard in Penang claimed that the typhoon which sank the junk in the South China Seas drowned all but one of the one hundred and nine aboard, one small boy being saved after days of drifting on wreckage. He then died in Malaya at a ripe old age.

12

One hundred and eight is a secret symbolic number used by secret societies, and one of the Triad gangs in British Malaya was known as the 'One Hundred and Eight Society.' with a devotee in Seremban
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THE WRESTLING PRINCES

KEITH STEVENS

Down the years I have visited many, many Chinese temples in my search for images of the deities and their legends. One near the coastal town of Muar in western Malaysia contained a pair of deities well known to me standing on the altar table before and below the main altar. The image consisted of a pair of conjoined deities - the Taibao Sheren, a Fujian local popular religion Daoist cult, involving a pair of youths, princes, so the story goes, who in image form are depicted standing together, legs apart, holding on to each other either with one arm around the other's shoulders or clutching a part of the other's anatomy, such as the knee, as if wrestling. In this instance the Taibao possibly means The Great Guardian, an old dynastic title for one of the most senior of the Chinese imperial advisers rather than the Great Protector which is the literal meaning. Sheren was a quasi-official title for "independent kinsmen” in other words "hangers on.”

Individually the two youths bear the names of Kang and Ruan though they were identified in two temples in southern Malaysia simply, one the Sheren as the Civil Protector, Wenbao and the other, the Taibao as the Military Protector, Wubao. They are worshipped for general good fortune and have only been identified in small Chinese temples within Fujian communities in Singapore, Malaysia, southern Thailand and in two or three temples in Taipei and Kaohsiung counties in Taiwan. In this rural temple near Muar Kesang the main deity on the altar is a seated matron known as Liu Jia Zhenren.

For Yuan Jian Zhenren, not seen anywhere else and said to be the mother of the two youths. Before and below her image are two sets of the youths, portraying them as wrestlers with leather shin-guards and wrist strengtheners, with one of the pair grasping the other firmly by the leg.

The two are believed by some to have been Indian princes brought to Fujian more than a thousand years ago and little more, apart from their surnames, would appear to be known at any of the temples in which these images have been seen. However, in one temple in Taiwan they were said to be the sons of a wealthy man. One son had shown great aptitude and had been sent to study in the capital, and was white

J
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