January 2009

By a quirk of the Chinese calendar, the advent of the Year of the Ox fell hard upon the western New Year this year, coming on the twenty sixth of January. The New Year approached with the city in recession and many people worrying whether they were going to find themselves laid off. Last year it was bitterly cold by our standards and this freeze up had badly stalled peoples’ homecoming trips in China. This year, the weather was far more clement.
   Temples are very busy places at this time of year. At Wong Tai Sin Temple, a shrine dedicated to a deity with the power of healing people start queuing up the night before Chinese New Year for the privilege of putting a joss stick into the pot as soon as possible in the first seconds of the new year. In Cantonese this can be expressed in two words, ‘first incense.’
   On the third day of the new year it is common to see a kilometre-long queue outside the Che Kung temple. Che Kung was a general during the Song Dynasty who accompanied the last Song emperor to exile in Hong Kong, and where Che Kung appeared in people’s dreams during an outbreak of the plague, thus earning their gratitude when the folk recovered. These days people traditionally go to Che Kung temple twice, one before Chinese New Year to say ‘thank you’ for the luck given in the past year and again after the celebrations, to request good fortune for the coming year. On all the devotees’ minds are health, a full lifespan, prosperity, family harmony, continuation of the family line and protection from danger. In fact in my visits to temples, nobody has paid the slightest attention to the presence of a westerner there even when I was making offerings, and I would sometimes see celebrities there mingling invisibly with the crowds of people.
  Traditionally Chinese practices have evolved from ancestor veneration, fertility cults, sacrifices to spirits of sacred objects and places, and belief in ghosts. By the time of the Song Dynasty, these ideas had blended into with Buddhist ideas of karma and purgatory and Taoist charms and methods of ritual renewal to form the beginnings of popular religion.
  With such a deep respect for these traditions and practices, people often look around carefully for any signs of good or bad fortune in the coming year. This year, with the recession on everyone’s mind, otherwise inconsequential events took on a new significance. Each year an official draws a fortune stick from Che Kung Temple. This year Lau Wong-fat extracted one that said the city should not isolate itself from the global economic turbulence but Hong Kongers should remain cautiously optimistic. The message's ambivalence prompted fung shui masters to interpret this to mean it signified conflict. The last time that stick was drawn was in 1992, when then Governor Chris Patten irked Beijing with his democratic reforms.
  Later that day one of the barges launching the fireworks caught fire. There were no injuries. A number of people considered this extremely minor and explicable accident something of an omen for the coming year. Likewise for a dog that died after being trapped for four days between the walls of ancestral home. Then a hawk trapped its wing in a nullah drain and a calf was trapped in another nullah. All these incidents prompted a fung shui master to predict a troubled year ahead. I personally found the rescue efforts for the trapped dog highly redolent of a more caring and compassionate society.

Slide show of more pictures from temples

Just the photos