Are Those… Whale Bones?

The most recent sighting of a whale in the waters off Tai O, the fishing village on the western tip of Lantau island, was quite unfortunate. On December 1, 2024, the carcass of a six-metre-long whale washed ashore, dead, its stomach filled with plastic bags. In decades past, whales and porpoises made more frequent appearances in these waters, but the increase in maritime traffic and pollution have kept these giant mammals away. 

But if you know where to look, there are signs of the days when they were more common. As you enter Tai O from the bus terminus on its eastern edge, you might notice a small museum called the Tai O Rural Committee Historical and Cultural Showroom. Inside, together with old bridal dresses, pottery and everyday objects, there is also a small display of fishing nets and other fishing equipment, and in the middle of it, a few vertebrae of a porpoise whale, its bones turned grey and brittle with time, but still impressive for their sheer size. The show is not very generous with captions, but the choice of placing the whale bones there speaks to a certain familiarity. 

That is further underlined as we walk deeper into the village, encountering its first significant temple the Kwan Tai Temple (gwaan1 dai3 miu6 關帝廟), where two impressive vertebrae are kept just by the main door. Again, there is little information about the bones, as all the information at hand is a simple note beside them. It tells us that fishermen in the past thought that large sea creatures were gods, and that these particular vertebral bones belonged to a whale estimated at more than 10 metres in length. No date is provided. Asking the keeper of the temple — who also sells incense and other offerings to those who come here to worship — yields few results. “It is very old,” she says, smiling a sweet and toothless smile. She does not elaborate. 

The Tai O Rural Committee Historical and Cultural Showroom(joeng4 hau4 gu2 miu6 楊侯古廟) , located at the southern edge of Tai O, presents another set of whale bones, again with little description, only saying that they were put in the sacred halls for safekeeping and worship. 

Part of this, of course, makes perfect sense: world literature is full of majestic whales that serve both as metaphor and a real-life encounter with a mysterious other. There is also the biblical story about Jonah in the Whale, and, much more recent and just as unforgettable, Moby Dick, written in 1851 by Herman Melville – or even the children’s tale Pinocchio, by Carlo Collodi, written in 1883. Whales scare and fascinate, in a way not too dissimilar from certain gods. Seen from this perspective, it is not too surprising that pieces of their skeleton should be found in a temple.  

Michael Rivera, a bio-anthropologist and lecturer at the Faculty of Social Sciences at Hong Kong University, notes that the field of zooarchaeology is still being developed, and without putting the vertebral bones under a microscope, the information we can gather about them remains quite elusive. “From a cultural point, though, we know that the role that whales played in the past was quite important, and that humans and other animals on the coast were deeply intertwined,” he says. 

For the most part, however, we have mostly conjecture to work with. One hypothesis is that the fishermen were hunting the whales. They were rich in resources: if you caught one, it would provide you not just with meat, but also blubber that you could burn for fuel. Even the baleen — a kind of filter inside the mouth of many species of whale — were useful: they could be used to make clothes or the structures of a house. The relics we see in the Tai O temples also demonstrate that whales weren’t simply functional in use, however. 

“We don’t have much information, but the fact that these are kept in a museum and in a temple makes it possible that they were linked to a sense of community, of identity, and tied to ritual and worship,” says Rivera. “The fact that these bones are untouched, that they have not been sharpened into tools, makes it harder to guess [why they were preserved], even if we have to take into account the importance that was obviously attributed to them, since they are in a temple.” 

Whale bones are not unique to Tai O: there is a rather large example in a Tin Hau temple on Peng Chau, too. It’s possible their presence in these places of worship is due to their rarity and strangeness. Confronted by such a big piece of bone, which may have been hunted or may simply have reached Tai O’s inhabitants through a beached carcass washed ashore, some might have felt that it deserved a special home to honour its uniqueness. More generally, though, it also reminds us of how much we have been overexploiting the sea, and curtailing the ways in which the creatures that have been living inside of it can move around, and find nutriment, without being displaced by human development or poisoned by human plastic waste. 

Next time you take a walk to Tai O, stop at the Kwan Tai and at Yeung Hau temples, and take a look at these gigantic vertebras: we may not know what they mean, but through our surprise, we can sense a very close sense of affinity with our predecessors, surprised enough to choose to put these remains next to the gods.