boon's log 0604.03
Happy Chinese New Year! Day9 Part Deux
Pai Tee Kong. Or in plain English (Manglish) Praying to the God of the Skies (or Heavens). There is a short write up I found through Google when you enter "Tee Kong" and Search. You can follow the following URL... which tells of a writer's point of view of how Tee Kong is one of the many names of God Himself...

http://eaglevision.com.my/na1abraham.htm

Anyway, here are some of the pictures taken during the Pai Tee Kong recently.


burnt offerings.


joss stick and candles. if you look closely, you can see some numbers appearing in the middle candle...


before...


after.... blast from the past.


much later...

The Pai Tee Kong ritual is normally carried out by the Chinese Hokkien community. It is the night before what the Hokkiens claim as the "actual new year".

History has it that once upon a time, there was a cruel emperor during ancient China who passed a decree that all Hokkiens will be eliminated (may have due to tribal warfare...). So, the emperor ordered his imperial soldiers on a search and destroy mission.

So, out desperation for survival, the Hokkien folks prayed to Tee Kong (God of the Heavens) for protection and blessing and then they ran for their lives (like Forrest G.) and hid in sugarcane plantations somewhere in the province of FuJien, China. They hid for 9 days (from the first day of the lunar new year till the 9th) and when the decree ended, the Hokkiens came out of the plantations were no longer "WANTED:DEAD". "Hallelujah!". So, since they hid in terror in the plantations for the nine days and did not get to celebrate the Lunar New Year, they celebrated on the 9th day as the actual New Year for them and they offered burnt offerings to the God of Heavens (Tee Kong) for protecting them from Death. That is why there is always sugarcane and burnt offerings during this ritual, to remember how Tee Kong has blessed the Hokkien-ese.

boon out...