Chegong Temple
There is a majestic Chegong Temple with a prosperous incense and cigarette smoke all year round. During the Chinese New Year, especially on Che Kung’s birthday on the third day of the new year, more than 100,000 devotees from all over Hong Kong and Kowloon came to Che Kung Temple to worship. Because some people could not squeeze into the temple to worship, they burned paper and incense in a nearby open space. You can imagine the grand scene.
According to legend, Che Gong was a fierce general in the late Southern Song Dynasty. His native place was Wufu, Nanchang, Jiangxi Province. He was named Grand Marshal for his contribution in quelling the rebellion in Jiangnan. Later, the Mongolian army pressed forward and drove in. The Song army was unable to resist and retreated steadily. The Emperor of the Song Dynasty fled to Hong Kong under the escort of the left prime minister Lu Xiufu. At that time, Marshal Che also escorted him to the south, but he died of illness on the way. The villagers remembered him for his loyalty and bravery, and worshiped him as a god after his death.
The Che Kung Temple in Tai Wai is famous far and wide. It was built in the late Ming Dynasty and has a history of more than 400 years. Together with the Hollywood Man Mo Temple, Wong Tai Sin Temple and Fo Tong Mun Temple, it is also known as one of the Four Great Temples in Hong Kong. One of the great temples.
There are two versions of the reason why this ancient temple was built. One is related to suppressing the plague, and the other is said to be related to the Feng Shui of the villagers in Tianxin Village.
During the Chongzhen period of the late Ming Dynasty, an epidemic suddenly occurred in various parts of the New Territories. Because medicine was not yet advanced at that time, people did not know what kind of epidemic it was. It was actually cholera; cholera is an infectious disease, and its causative agent is Tigerella. They move around in the water, so the infection spreads very quickly. At that time, the Sha Tin area was the most popular.
Later, the villagers studied history books and county annals and discovered that there was a Marshal Che in the Song Dynasty. Not only did he defeat thieves, but he also stopped epidemics wherever he went, so they asked someone to build a statue of Marshal Che. , built a Chegong Temple here to suppress the epidemic. On the day the temple is built, epidemics will cease to spread.
Another theory is that when the villagers of Tianxin Village founded the village in the past, they hired Master Kanyu to survey the village and found that three rivers converged here in front of the village. At the same time, with the green hills in the back to the north, the Feng Shui is excellent. It is most suitable to build a temple and a town at Shuikou, and you will be prosperous in the future. Therefore, the villagers actively donated money to build the Chegong Temple there to worship Marshal Che.
Later, a plague happened in Liyuan. Many people contracted the disease and died for no apparent reason. The villagers were all panicked, thinking that it was evil spirits. At that time, medicine was not yet developed, so the villagers had no other choice but to pray to God for blessing.
The villagers can only place their hopes entirely on Che Gong. In order to ward off diseases and evil spirits, they carried the statue of Che Gong around various villages, beat gongs and drums, and burned firecrackers. Later, the plague disappeared as expected. The villagers believed that Che Gong was very efficacious, so they invited monks and Taoists to set up an altar and build a memorial ceremony to pray for Che Gong's protection and good weather for the people and the country. He also made a wish in front of the Chegong Temple and held a grand ceremony to establish a memorial ceremony every ten years to repay God's grace. Since then, the ritual ceremony held once every ten years has become a major event in Sha Tin District. Che Gong has also become famous far and wide, and many people come to pay homage to it.
Dragon King Temple in Peony District, Heze
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22.5 kilometers southwest of Heze City, east of the Diaotun River in Wanghaotun Town, there is a lush forest Dragon King Fengcun. Feng Chongli, the ancestor of the Feng family in this village, was originally from Xiangheng County, Shanxi Province. He moved here to establish a manor during the reign of Zhu Youtang and Hongzhi, Emperor Xiaozong of the Ming Dynasty (1488-1505). This place was originally a site in the Yellow River Flood Area, with low-lying terrain and a lot of saline-alkali land, so it was named Fengjiawa.
In the seventh year of Zhengde (1512), the seventh year of Emperor Wuzong of the Ming Dynasty, Zhu Houzhao, it is said that a strong man named Jiao Yixing, the third child, came to Fengjiawa to stay and was willing to help Feng Chongli farm. After Feng Chongli promised, Jiao San got up early and worked hard at night, chopping thorn roots and sowing grain and cotton. Whenever there is a drought and the seedlings wither, Jiao San is able to stir up clouds and provide rain, responding to requests. When Jiao San's three-year term as a part-time worker expired, Feng Chongli agreed to meet again when there were heavy clouds, thunder and rain. As soon as Jiao San finished speaking, the sky suddenly became dark, thunder rumbled, and Jiao San soared into the sky without a trace. Only then did Feng Chongli realize that "Jiao San" was the pseudonym of the Dragon King. In order to repay the kindness of the Dragon King, the people of Fengjiawa built a Dragon King temple in the south of Fengjiawa Village. Fengjiawa also changed its name to Dragon King Feng.
The Longwang Temple courtyard covers an area of ??5 acres. The temple gate is towering and majestic. There is an ancient pool in the temple, called Longkeng. Directly north of the temple, there is a main hall and a side hall.
In front of the main hall, there is a colorful shed to welcome pilgrims, with double eaves and ridged animals lined up, just like the approach road in front of the Dragon Palace. Behind the colorful shed are three dragon palace halls. In the hall, there is a golden dragon king sitting upright facing south, with shining eyes, overlooking the lower realm. After the Dragon King, there is a sculpture of a black mountain to guide the feng shui of the country. There is a statue of an old man with a gray beard in the east of the hall, with kind eyebrows and kind eyes, and his eyes are filled with joy. There are two attendants standing side by side on the west side of the hall. The one in the south is the Niu Tou Lord, holding a three-pronged steel fork in his hand, hoping to eliminate violence and bring peace to the good; the north is the Yaksha Lord, staring with angry eyes, waiting to fight injustice. There are two beams running through the top of the hall, each coiled with a dragon, with its head facing south and its tail facing north. It is named Master Yu, also known as Master Yubu. The four walls of the hall are painted with various figures from the legend of the Dragon King, which are bizarre and lifelike.
On the left side of the main hall, there are three side halls. Hanging in the middle is a couplet written by Chao Xiuli of Chao Village in the south of Dingtao County in 1944: The old farmer in Xunye Village admired the Feng family as the host, and he found out that Jiao's surname was the God of Shangfang after touching the ruins of the stele.
There is an octagonal glazed well in the north of Dragon King Feng Village. The water is clear and bitter-sweet and has never dried up. It is known as a wonder.
Dragon King Fengcun still treasures a scroll about the biography of the Dragon King, with rich pictures and texts, and more than a hundred anecdotes of the Dragon King. For example, "Longkeng Longjing Leads to the East China Sea": It tells that in the spring of Jiao San's third year in Fengjiawa, there was a drought and no rain, the seedlings in the fields were half dry, and people were extremely anxious. Jiao San said to Feng Chongli: "Don't panic, boss, we can water the ground tomorrow." Feng Chongli didn't believe it and just sighed. But in the middle of the night, there suddenly came a thunderstorm, and the heavy rain filled the trenches. This year's crops had a good harvest. Another example is "A Seedling in Eighteen Mu of Land": It is said that Jiao San planted red sorghum on an eighteen mu of land for Feng Chongli. When Jiao San was thinning out the seedlings, only five seedlings were left - one in the middle and one in each corner. When Feng Chongli saw the trees, he said angrily: "The hoeing was good, but the seedlings were too thick." Jiao San then hoeed off the four trees at the corner of the field, making Feng Chongli so angry that he wanted to get angry. This single seedling grew in the summer heat, and the sorghum stalk was as thick as a house beam. When the sorghum heads, it looks like a flaming cloud from a distance and a ball of red agate from a close look. Jiao San rolled the eighteen acres of land into a flat field, climbed up to the sorghum tree, opened the jujube wood pole and swung it, and the sorghum particles fell like red rain, which was more than 1 meter thick. Jiao San said: "Master, if you don't want so much, I'll pour it out." Jiao San swung the jujube wood pole to the south, and with a "swish" sound, a red cloud moved to the southeast, covering a hundred miles southeast. The sorghum harvest has been good for three years.
Because Jiao San is the incarnation of the Dragon King, in order to commemorate the kindness of the Dragon King, the residents of the Dragon King Feng area raised funds to build the Dragon King Temple in the Ming Dynasty, erected stone tablets, and carved inscriptions. Unfortunately, the original temples, stone tablets and "Kanghui Dragon King Biography" were destroyed in various wars and the "Cultural Revolution". Now only the imperial inscriptions of Qing Dezong (Aixinjueluo Zaitian) in the third year of Guangxu's reign (1877) remain. There is a gold plaque "Ze Pei Common People". People near Dragon King Feng donated money to rebuild the Dragon King Temple in 1988 to commemorate it.
Nowadays, on the auspicious days of "the dragon raises its head on the second day of February" and "the dragon's birthday on the fifth day of July" in the lunar calendar, people from Jiangsu, Shandong, Henan, Anhui and other parties attend the Dragon King Temple Fair on time, held by Dragon King Feng. This has become a folk program for visiting relatives and friends and prospering the economy.