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The birthday
Thousands come on the second and third days of the New Year
During the second and third days of Lunar New Year, thousands of people go to the Che Kung temple in Tai Wai to worship. Worshippers bring incense sticks, red candles, fresh fruits, flowers and New Year food. First they hit the Drum of heaven, to inform Che Kung that they have come.
100,000people visit the Tai Wai temple in the festival season, by one count
The general
Che Kung was a Southern Song general said to clear epidemics
Che Kung served in the Southern Song dynasty and is believed by some worshippers to have helped bring Prince Ping and his brother to the South. In one story, an epidemic broke out in Sha Tin in the late Ming dynasty, and residents read that he cleared epidemics wherever he set foot. They built him a temple, and the epidemic subsided on the day the building was completed.
The pinwheel
A golden pinwheel is spun clockwise to keep last year's luck
Outside the temple, worshippers spin the golden pinwheel with the left hand. Clockwise carries last year's good luck into the coming year, and counterclockwise is to change bad luck into good. In the main hall, a fan-bladed wheel of fortune beside the statue is believed to bring good luck when turned three times.
The sticks
In 2003 the worst possible bamboo stick was drawn for the city
Followers believe the divination at this temple has been accurate. In 2003 Minister of Home Affairs Dr Patrick Ho Chi-Ping drew the worst possible bamboo stick for the city on the Birthday of Che Kung. In the same year Hong Kong was hit by the SARS outbreak. Since 2004 the person drawing for Hong Kong has been Lau Wong Fat of the Heung Yee Kuk.
Old and new
A new temple was built in front of the old one in 1994
Because of the high number of worshipers during the Che Kung Festival, a new temple was built in 1994 in front of the original one. It is eight times the size of the old one, and its main hall holds a giant statue of Che Kung. The original, first built at the end of the Ming dynasty, is preserved in place and only occasionally open to the public.
In this plan
It is one of the stops on this plan.
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The words are a retelling of the Wikipedia article Che Kung Temple, and are shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. They are checked against those articles, and a fact that is not in them is left out.