Last Monday, April 25 was the birthday of Tin Hau. She is also known as Mazu and she is the goddess of the sea. She protects fishermen and sailors. You are supposed to invoke her whenever going on a journey, especially by sea! I gather it's no surprise that's she is so popular in Hong Kong... According to Wikipedia (my university professors would have had conniptions if I ever wrote that on a paper), her birthday is the twenty-third day of the third lunar month of the Chinese calender. Quite a mouthful.
For those who didn't know, the lunar calendar actually changes every year. Now, the only real reason that people in Hong Kong ever use the lunar calender is when calculating festival stuff. Otherwise, the standard Gregorian calendar is used. I don't know how sad this is but I actually had to look up the name of the calendar the U.S. and I use. I'm hoping that I deleted this bit of information as useless instead of never learning it because I feel like that's a pretty big gap in my knowledge... Funny what we take for granted.
By the way, funny little fact about me: if you were to ever meet my Chinese grandmother and ask her for the date of something, she will ALWAYS give a lunar calendar date. Every year it's a guessing game for when to celebrate her birthday because she never uses the date listed on her I.D. card. I feel like it's almost a little joke to see just how far she can push our patience before she lets up and allows us to arbitrarily choose a day that we can all visit.
Anyway, even though this year her birthday was on Monday, the celebration actually started the day before. On Sunday I ended up going to a Tin Hau temple in Yuen Long which is almost in the exact opposite direction of where I live. I used the MTR to get there and it took almost an hour and a half. I got a bit of a late start and didn't actually arrive until around 5. I was expecting everything to be shut down but little known fact (actually, this could be incredibly widespread and I just didn't know), this temple is actually open all night in preparation for the birthday festivities.
I didn't feel like navigating the bus system so I got into a cab and asked for the Yuen Long Tin Hau miu (temple) and he brought me to the temple of the giant tree. I feel like there are so many little temples that they all need something to distinguish themselves and this one used the huge tree growing in the front. The way to celebrate her to to burn a ton of things and offer her food like oranges and meats. I get the feeling that Hong Kongers are all just a bunch of pyromaniacs and that they use festivals/veneration as an excuse. They have shops outside of the temple as well as inside in case you forgot your own set of incense, paper boats, and other sorts of papery trinkets. They also have fortune tellers inside and you have to fight your way through reams of smoke and people waving burning incense through the air to get to the altars in the front.
This temple was extremely active and fairly large with around three or four rooms. Also, around the outside of the tree, they had set up sink-like things and people were rubbing the handle
After a couple of hours of this, I headed home in preparation for the next day. In Clear Water Bay, there is a very famous Tin Hau temple called the Joss House Bay Tin Hau temple. Day of her birthday, people will take ferries from Northpoint, what with her being the sea goddess and all. You can also cab/bus there and then walk down a little path to the sea. I opted to cab there. This is apparently such a big thing that police will actually cordon off roads to minimize traffic. Once the cabby told them where we were headed, they let us through. The path to the temple is littered with little paper prayers. People will even stick incense into beer cans. There were police all around the temple, to keep the peace I suppose. I'm not quite sure how rowdy they thought people would get... To be honest, I actually preferred the Yuen Long Temple. This one seemed put on in a way that the tree one didn't. After a quick look see, I actually ended up taking the ferry to Northpoint. Good timing too since 4:30 was the last ferry out! Apparently the night before is a lot wilder than the day of.
 |
| Apparently you choose the large circular ones for when you're about to go on a trip: the longer the trip, the longer the incense! |
I hope this was informative and that I didn't sound too idiotic... I'm aware I rambled a bit!
