Deities, Altars, and Rites
Read the deities named in temple registers, co-worship, and the ritual year.
Deities, shared altars and co-worship
Half of the 327 registered temples name a single deity; the other half name between two and eighteen, and every deity named beside another is a tie in a network of co-worship. Drawn as a graph, the register shows a pantheon with a single hinge. Guanyin is named in 119 temples and shares an altar with 40 of the 41 other deities that appear three times or more: 13 Buddhist figures, 12 popular and local cults, 10 Daoist celestials and 5 gods of sea and territory. Eighty-one temples set Buddhist images beside Daoist or popular ones in the same hall. The one-religion label the atlas assigns to each site erases exactly this layer, which is why the register, and not the atlas, is the source to read for the texture of Chinese religion in Hong Kong.
Deities named in the register, after merging variant names (Guanyin, Guanyin Pusa and Guanyin Dashi are one). Colour marks the broad pantheon; the count is the number of temples naming the deity.
Distribution of the number of distinct deities each registered temple names, by tier of the register. Administered temples, the old urban and coastal temples the Committee runs directly, carry the longest lists.
Each glyph is one registered temple's altar read from its register entry: the principal deity, named first, stands at the centre; the attendant deities stand in the order the register gives them, alternating right and left as they would on a real altar table. Colour is the deity's broad tradition, so a glyph with a gold centre and red wings is a Buddhist figure flanked by popular cults. The large composite glyphs at the top sum every temple that has the same principal deity: the size of each attendant is the number of temples in which it stands beside that principal. Below, the wall shows all 162 temples that name more than one deity, grouped by principal. Hover any figure for the temple and its full list; click a composite to filter the wall.
Deities most often enshrined with Guanyin, with the count of shared temples. The bar colour is the partner's tradition.
Pairs of deities most often named in the same temple, leaving out Guanyin, whose partners are charted beside it. Half the temples name a single deity; one names eighteen.
The pantheon through ten deities
Ten deities account for much of the register’s wording. Each card gives the number of the 327 entries that name the deity, the earliest dated foundation that can be documented in Hong Kong, where the cult came from, and a few facts about its festival and its altars. Where no single founding exists, the card says so.
Ritual Year
A place of worship is also a date. The register's deity lists, joined to the birthday calendar kept by the Chinese Temples Committee and to the festival dates in Chinese-language reference works, give 294 of the 327 temples at least one day in the lunar year on which they hold a celebration. The eighth day of the fourth month, Buddha's birthday, and the nineteenth of the second, sixth and ninth months, the three feasts of Guanyin, each involve more than a hundred temples; the twenty-third of the third month, Tin Hau's birthday, involves fifty-nine. Around this yearly calendar runs a slower one. The Jiao, or Taiping Qingjiao, is a community rite of renewal that a village alliance holds once a year in Cheung Chau, once a decade in most of the New Territories, and once in sixty years in Sheung Shui, where the Liu lineage last held it in 2006. Forty-eight Jiao are mapped here from published lists, forty-two still held.
Every community Jiao in the list, one row each, sorted by the length of its cycle: the annual rites of Cheung Chau and the Tin Hau temples at the top, the decennial rites of the walled villages in the middle, the thirty-year rite of Tseng Lan Shue and the sixty-year rite of Sheung Shui at the bottom. Each mark is a year in which the rite was, or by its stated cycle will be, held; the solid marks are years recorded in the source list, the paler marks are projected from the recorded years and the cycle. Hollow rows are rites recorded as discontinued, placed at their last approximate date. Columns carry the stem-and-branch year names, so the rites tied to a cyclical sign, the bing years of Tin Sam, the ding years of Tai Wai, the bing-xu year of Sheung Shui, line up vertically. Type a year to see which rites fall in it.
Eighteen districts against the twelve lunar months. Each cell counts the festival days celebrated by registered temples in that district, with each temple counted once per deity birthday on its altar; the darker the cell, the fuller the month. Toggle to the radial calendar for the territory as a whole. Hover a cell for the festivals.
Community Jiao located by village or island, coloured by cycle. Hollow points are Jiao recorded as discontinued. Click a point for the community, the deity honoured and the cycle.
Ten rites of the ritual year
Ten of the most spectacular ceremonies and festivals of Hong Kong, from the fire dragons of Tai Hang and Pok Fu Lam to the water parade of Tai O. Each card gives the lunar date, one figure, the history of the rite and a short list of facts.