Items From the Past: Wong Tai Sin Temple and the Shing Mun Redoubt

On the afternoon of [April 10, 1994], we went to Wong Tai Sin Temple in Kowloon, a colorful, lively place. A weekend crowd was there and the air was smoky thick with burning joss. It is the first Taoist temple I've ever been to, though if I hadn't read about it beforehand, I'm not expert enough in Chinese religion to have known that.


The Main Altar of Wong Tai Sin Temple. According to Travel China Guide, "Many people who visit the temple come to have their fortunes told. Generally, worshippers entreat the fate of the same year. They light worship sticks, kneel before the main altar, make a wish, and shake a bamboo cylinder containing fortune sticks until one falls out."

Friday [April 15, 1994], found us on a short trip out to the New Territories. We spent part of the day walking a series of trails connected to the MacLehose Trail, "family walks" in the parlance of the Hong Kong park service. To get there, you take the subway to the end of the line at Tseun Wan, a major nexus of danchi and construction sites. From there, take a microbus to Shing Mun Country Park, a fine green spot around a reservoir dug in the '30s to supply the city. Hong Kong usually isn't associated with this kind of greenery. Almost no one else was there -- I don't associate a lack of crowds with the place either, but the park defied expectations. Maybe it's a different story on weekends.

We were under a double layer of shade: tall trees, and above that, a high thin layer of clouds. So the walking was cool. Later we did go on a section of the MacLehose Trail proper, Section 6, and hiked up a hill to the Shing Mun Redoubt, or what was left of it from the battle in '41. Still in evidence were long tunnels made of concrete, dug through the top of the hill. At their entrances are fanciful names -- London streets. Later generations have added graffiti to the ruins, and nature is slowly eating away at the concrete.


A fragment of the Shing Mun Redoubt along the MacLehose Trail, which snakes through the New Territories for about 60 miles. I'm not sure why I didn't take any photos of the overgrown concrete bunkers nearby.

Item From the Past: Something I Stole From a Hungry Ghost

I arrived in Hong Kong for the first time in early September 1990, and on the first or maybe second evening, I found this on the sidewalk:


Without planning to, and without ever having heard of it before, I'd arrived at the climax of the Hungry Ghost Festival. Even now I have only the vaguest understanding of the festival -- sometimes simply called the Ghost Festival in English -- in its Chinese context. But it seemed to be fairly important, and involved giving gifts to roaming spirits, especially by burning offerings such as joss paper at spots on the sidewalk. I've read that paper houses and cars and other items are also burned; something about sharing your prosperity with ancestral spirits.

I saw more piles of ash than I did anything else, but somehow or another this note escaped the flames. I couldn't pass up a souvenir like that.

The object itself is in storage with other bits of paper, and I don't fell like digging it out right now, but if I remember right, the King of Hell or somesuch was on the other side. I have to wonder how far $50 million goes in Hell, but I don't doubt that they need money there. Interesting to note, too, that Hell uses dollars, but maybe that's because Hong Kong calls its currency that as well. Such notes printed in Canton might be yuan-denominated.

The upshot is that instead of $50M going to Hell, it went back to Japan with me, and later to North America. So far I haven't met a hungry ghost on a moonless night demanding his money back.