| HONG KONG’S Wong Tai Sin Temple locates itself imaginally at China’s Taoist roots where benevolence, mysticism and pragmatics apply in equal measure.
The Embodiment of Myth in Modern Worship
To witness a dynamic marriage between the alchemical legend of a deified Taoist saint who lived in fourth-century China and a flourishing community in the twenty-first, one needs look no further than the temple compound located in the bustling residential neighbourhood in Hong Kong named after Wong Tai Sin 黄大仙 (huang daxian). Known locally as the presiding deity who grants benevolent blessings to worshippers and patients at the free Chinese medical clinic on the temple grounds, his name means the Great Immortal Sage Wong.
One purpose of this paper is to provide the reader an introduction to the remarkable and fairly recent history of this cult of worship in Hong Kong. Another is to lay the thematic groundwork for...
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THE Macao Special Administrative Region, situated at the mouth of the Pearl River, is now composed of the Macao Peninsula, Taipa, Cotai and Coloane. In contrast to the historic centre of Macao which boasts a Chinese-Western cultural heritage of several hundred years, the newly connected Coloane-Taipa area is full of cultural significance and development potential. The islands such as the Big Taipa (Dadang), Small Taipa (Xiaodang), Yilimi Island, Coloane and the Coloane-Taipa waterway on the Crossdoor (Shizimen) sea area south of the Macao Peninsula, originally belonging to the Xiangshan County, Guangdong Province, were occupied one after another by the Portuguese between the years of 1851 and 1864. The geographic environment of the Taipa and Coloane islands in the twentieth century is formed by multi-factors such as the alluvial deposits brought about by the seawater, the reclamation of reclaimed sand fields by the fishermen and the land reclamation effort by Macao’s Portuguese Government(1)...
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