Historic buildings are a rare commodity in Hong Kong. The oldest parts of the city have been so intensively developed, there have often been five or six generations of buildings on a single plot of land over the past 150 years. And yet hiding in plain sight are ornate structures that sometimes take back several centuries: temples.
There are so many temples in Hong Kong, nobody seems to agree on exactly how many exist. Most records indicate there are over 600 Chinese temples, shrines and monasteries across the territory; more than half of these are standalone structures.
The oldest surviving temple in Hong Kong is the Joss House Bay Tin Hau Temple, which was built in 1266 during the Song dynasty (960–1279), whose final boy emperors lived (and died) in Hong Kong as they fled the invading Mongolian army that established the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368) in the north.
It’s significant that the oldest temple was dedicated to Tin Hau, the goddess of the sea. Fishing, salt production and coastal exchange defined Hong Kong in those early days; people lived and died by the whims of the sea. Another figure honoured in some of the oldest temples is Hau Wong, also known as Yeung Hau: he is the immortal incarnation of Yeung Leung-jit, one of the Song emperors’ armed guards. The Yeung Hau Temple in Tai O was built in 1699; the Hau Wong Temple in Kowloon City has stood there since 1730.
Each of Hong Kong’s temples reflects the communities that built them but also the evolution of Hong Kong as it grew from a sparsely-populated collection of fishing and farming villages into a modern city. As mainland Chinese migrants flocked to Hong Kong Island when it was colonised by the British in 1841, temples became the central organising structures of their society.
Sheung Wan’s Man Mo Temple, which was built in stages starting in the late 1840s, is a key example. It wasn’t just a place to worship Man Cheong, the god of literature and Mo Tai, the god of war; it was a place to settle disputes, organise festivals and receive charitable tuition to cover the cost of your children’s education.
This is an incredibly rich topic, one that combines social and political history, everyday culture, Chinese religious practices, architecture and vernacular design. That’s one of the reasons we have always been so eager to cover it in Zolima CityMag. But it’s also a world that can be a bit overwhelming when you first encounter it. Even many lifelong Hongkongers can’t explain all the stories, details and rituals they encounter at the city’s temples; for a newcomer to the city, it’s bewildering.
So it’s useful to have a guide like Ken Raby’s Hong Kong Temples, which was published in 2005. This is anything but a dense, academic volume: it’s a pocket-sized 237-page volume that consists mainly of photos and maps. After an efficient introduction, Raby gets to the real heart of the book, which is to offer a detailed look inside 65 temples all across Hong Kong, with maps indicating the layout of each temple and the location of their many different components, from shrines to different gods to fortune telling tables to spirit screens. (Spirit screens are ornate freestanding walls that shield the interior of the temple from malicious spirits, who can only travel in straight lines.) It’s by browsing through these dozens of temples that you realise how varied they are.
There is detailed information about famous landmarks like the Lo Pan Temple in Kennedy Town, the Ten Thousand Buddhas Monastery in Sha Tin and Wong Tai Sin, probably Hong Kong’s most renowned temple and the only one dedicated to an entirely homegrown deity. But perhaps the most enlightening sections document some of the smaller temples you might pass by without really remarking. One example: the Hung Sing Yeh Temple on Ap Lei Chau, which was built in 1773 to honour the god of seafarers. As you might expect, the temple’s decor includes many nautical motifs, including two ship’s masts decorated with dragons, which stand in front of the temple’s entrance. Inside, there is not only a shrine to Hung Sing Yeh, but also to Kwan Tai, the god of war; Pau Kung, the god of justice; Tai Sui, who is both a Taoist god and a kind of cosmic ball of chaotic energy; and various Buddhas and Taoist saints.
Raby ends the book with a 13-page index cataloguing 221 different saints and their names in Cantonese pinyin, Chinese, Mandarin pinyin and English. It serves as a reminder of how this universe is at once dense and expansive. Reading Hong Kong Temples is equivalent to dipping your toes in the ocean before jumping in — a wise first course of action.
Hong Kong Temples is self-published by Ken Raby. It is available on Amazon and at Hong Kong Public Libraries.