Che Kung Miu

About

Che Kung Miu (車公廟), often translated as the Che Kung Temple, is a Temple in Tai Wai in Hong Kong's Sha Tin District, dedicated to the Chinese deity Che Kung. The same name is borne by another Temple at Ho Chung, and several further Temples in Hong Kong include Che Kung among their honoured deities.

Che Kung is venerated as a general who served the imperial court during the Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279). Some devotees connect him to the desperate effort to keep the Song state alive after the fall of the north, particularly the journey said to have brought the young Prince Ping and his brother to the south. Across centuries he came to be honoured as a guardian whose protection devotees invoke against misfortune and illness.

The Sha Tin Temple is one of the most-visited Daoist and Chinese folk-religious sanctuaries in Hong Kong, especially around Lunar New Year, when crowds gather to spin the bronze 'fortune wheel' before the deity and ask his blessings for the year ahead.

History

Local tradition holds that the god was invited to Sha Tin from the older Che Kung Temple at Ho Chung, where villagers first raised a shrine to the Southern Song general known as Che Da Yuan Shuai, Marshal Che, after he was credited with curing a plague among them. The Sha Tin shrine's own history is said to reach back to the end of the Ming dynasty, with a renovation recorded in 1890. As Lunar New Year crowds outgrew the old building, the Chinese Temples Committee, which has managed the Temple since 1936, built the present, far larger hall in 1993 to 1994 in front of the original shrine, at a cost of about HK$48 million, with further renovation in 2004. One strand of local tradition holds that the Sha Tin Temple specifically honours Che Kung's grandson rather than the general himself, though popular devotion at the Temple today addresses Che Kung directly.

Significance

Devotees come to Che Kung seeking protection from illness and misfortune, the same power villagers first invoked centuries ago, and the Temple remains one of the most visited Taoist sanctuaries in Hong Kong. Its best known observance is Che Kung's Birthday on the second day of the Lunar New Year, when devotees spin the Temple's bronze pinwheels, turning them clockwise to carry good fortune onward or counterclockwise to turn ill fortune around, a custom now inseparable from how Hong Kong itself opens each new year.

Architecture

Cantonese Temple architecture on a grand modern scale: dark multi-tiered tiled eaves, a walled granite-flagged courtyard lined with large stone statues of Che Kung's attendant generals, a red entrance gate, and a bronze pavilion-roofed incense censer at its centre