oh! my god(s)

Although I first came to Hong Kong more than 50 years ago, there are still places in the territory that I’ve never visited. Stanley, a small town on the south coast of Hong Kong Island, fell into this category until last week, when Paula suggested that we pay a visit after we’d been to the Registration of Persons office in Kowloon to pick up my new ID card (I’d lost my old one over the summer). Mind you, in common with many Hongkies who live on Kowloon side, I don’t often cross the harbour to the Island side, which partly explains the omission.

Stanley’s main attraction, at least for tourists, is its market, where you can buy all sorts of exotic items. However, when we arrived, the first thing I noticed was a sign pointing the way to a Tin Hau temple (Tin Hau is the goddess of the sea in Chinese culture), so that is where we went instead:

The first thin I noticed when we stepped inside was the door gods, Yuchi Jingde on the left:

…and Qin Shu Bao on the right:

Although I’ve recorded many examples of door gods on the doors of ancestral halls, study halls and temples, this was the first new example I’d seen in quite some time, and the first thing I noticed here was that the door gods weren’t merely painted on the doors; they were embossed, in a kind of bas-relief. I also noticed that although the two door gods held ‘standard’ weapons—a halberd by Yuchi Jingde and a pole sword by Qin Shu Bao—they grasped these weapons with both hands. It is much more common for the pair to hold these weapons with just one hand while holding a sword, still in its sheath, with the other hand. These door gods are also facing squarely forward, when they should be facing slightly inwards to ensure that intruders cannot sneak in between them.

I then took these photographs just inside the entrance:

I cannot offer any information regarding the subjects of these photos, although you might notice the dragons on the vertical panels in the third photo.

Then we ventured into the rear hall of the temple, where I spotted a sign that read ‘photography available’, which I interpreted as meaning that photography was allowed—we’ve visited temples and monasteries where photography is explicitly forbidden. And I certainly wanted to photograph what we saw here! My final five photographs show the array of gods along the back wall of the temple (from left to right):

I don’t know who or what the array of figures in the next photo represent (scholars and warriors?), but we saw a similar display in the China section of the Royal Ontario Museum when we visited Toronto back in August:

Notice the red signs on the walls behind these figures. These are the names of the various entities, something that I’ve not seen anywhere else:

And that was the Tin Hau temple in Stanley. Well worth a look inside, although the building itself is singularly uninteresting.