Shanghai’s Hidden Ming Temple
In a narrow lane off the Nanjing Road pedestrian street stands a small, shabby box of a building. It’s no match for the flash and buzz of the famous street, yet its powers are so mighty that it has remained part of Shanghai life since the Ming Dynasty.
On the roof, a plain red sign with two bright yellow characters reveals a hint: 虹庙 — Hong Miao, the Rainbow Temple [1]. In the lane, hopeful vendors coo, “watch, bags?”. Obviously, any foreigner who has wandered down here must be a lost shopper.
Another hint lies on a small table in the lane: packages of incense, carelessly strewn atop cartons of Double Happiness cigarettes. Nearby, spent incense sticks and drips of red candle wax decorate the ground like a Jackson Pollock painting.
Come by on a holy day, and the small stretch will be abuzz: smoke rising from containers where joss papers are burning merrily, worshippers lighting incense from red tapers, and prayers fervently offered to a small image high on an outside wall, electrical wires wrapped around it like a frame. The image is so weathered you can hardly make it out, but that doesn’t seem to matter to the supplicants. They know they’re praying to Guan Yin, the goddess of mercy, as generations and generations have done in this place before them.
From Ancestral Shrine to Courtesan Worship
Hong Miao was established during the reign of the Wanli Emperor (1573-1619), just after the city wall had gone up around the Old Town to defend against marauding Japanese pirates. It’s not the oldest temple in Shanghai, by a long shot: Two centuries earlier, the City God temple had been established.
Around the time Hong Miao was set up, scholar official Pan Yunduan was putting the finishing touches on a to-die-for classical garden for his parents, one that he would call Yuyuan. Another scholar official, Xi Guangqi, was baptized around this time by Matteo Ricci, marking the beginning of the Jesuit tradition in Shanghai, one that would transform so many aspects of Shanghai life.
Originally the ancestral shrine for the Qu family, Hong Miao evolved into a Buddhist temple to Guan Yin, supported by a pair of devout families. By the 18th century, Hong Miao’s Buddhist monks had turned it over to a Taoist priest, but Guan Yin remained, with an altar dedicated to her in the main hall, along with Taoist gods, and even the land god. The Dianshizai Pictorial described it thus:
“The major deity in the main hall was Guanyin, and in the eastern hall Guan Gong [The God of War]. There were images of the God of Wealth, the Three Great Emperors (Heaven, Earth, Water), the King of the Underworld, and other various dieties in the Hall of the Constellations of Heaven.” [2]
Charity became part of the temple’s mission, as well, with donations of clothing, medication, and to hospitals and orphanages.
Much needed capital was injected into the temple for refurbishments, and Hong Miao became one of Shanghai’s two most important temples (the other was City God), a must-see highlighted in travel guides and perpetually busy. Yet despite its fame, it seems to always have been a simple affair. Then, as now, it was “a humble collection of just a few rooms”, nothing “but a roofed courtyard surrounded by niches and dark corners” [3] A 1925 description nearly sums it up today:
“In the middle of the bustle and hurry of the busiest street in the Orient we are suddenly in the semi-dark, incense-laden atmosphere of a temple, Hong Miao. A prosperous, well-patronized Chinese merchant hurries in for a moment to arrange matters with his favorite deity — at so much per matter to the bland-faced priest.”[[4]]
It wasn’t just merchants: Hong Miao’s legendary powers “attracted an incessant stream of supplicants praying for children, for wealth, for long life, or seeking divine guidance by drawing lots,” reports the Dianshizai Pictorial, [5].
Most famously, the temple was a favorite of the courtesans of old Shanghai. They considered Guan Yin their patron saint, and the red light district was close by, around Fuzhou Road. The writer Mao Dun, reminiscing about Chinese New Year in 1933, conjures up a delightful image:
“On the afternoon of New Year’s Day, courtesans burned incense at the Hong Miao temple on Nanjing Road wearing red gowns hemmed with golden bells and riding in horse-drawn carriages.” [5]
Indeed, ladies of the evening from the high-class brothels famously took a regular constitutional in their carriages, dressed to the nines, with the grand finale a loop around the nearby racetrack on Park Lane (Nanjing Road).
Hong Miao, the Tycoon and the Gangster
Another famous supplicant was said to be Liza Luo, a Eurasian beauty and devoted Buddhist. She prayed at Hong Miao daily, burning incense and sending up fervent prayers for success and wealth for her businessman husband. She was there one day when notices went up outside the temple announcing that the area would soon be part of the International Settlement. While the monks grumbled about the pandemonium this would bring, Lisa quickly bowed three times to Buddha, and hurried home – her prayers had been answered.
Liza was as shrewd as she was devout, and she encouraged her husband to buy land along the street and to invest 600,000 silver taels of his own money to pave the road with expensive pearwood (铁梨木). The street was Nanjing Road, and Lisa’s husband was Silas Hardoon.
The attractive road soon drew big league players like the “Big Four Department Stores” (Sincere, Wing On, Sun, and Sun Sun) all of which rented from Hardoon, helping to make it the “No. 1 Shopping Street” in Shanghai, and therefore China.
Hardoon had arrived penniless in Shanghai from Baghdad, but living frugally and investing wisely in real estate had made him a rich man. He was already wealthy when he bought the Nanjing Road land, but it was this purchase that would catapult him into the stratosphere, making him the richest man in Shanghai.
Whether this tale is an urban myth or truth, who knows, but Hardoon did own most of the real estate on both sides of Nanjing Road, and Shanghai newspapers reported that he spent 600,000 taels on paving the road, immortalized in a bit of doggerel:
Hardoon, Hardoon, an extraordinary man;
Built a huge fortune, Built the road for the public good
Paved the road for the people
Tram lines on Nanjing Road
Pave the road, pave the road, pave the road,
Doing good, good fortune finds him.
With its reputed powers to grant devotees wishes, it’s hardly surprising that Hong Miao attracted the rich, like Hardoon, and the powerful. In the latter category was Du Yue Sheng, Shanghai’s most famous gangster. Du was head of the Green Gang, whose fingers were everywhere, from businesses to brothels, opium to politics. Du prided himself on being a respectable member of society: his entry in “Men of Shanghai and North China” describes him as “Financier, Banker, and Industrialist”, listing two paragraphs of public, civic, and charitable work. . In 1946, when Hong Miao reorganized its board, Du was named Chairman of the Board.
The Dragon Protectors
Like all temples, Hong Miao was closed as a place of worship during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), with religious statuary destroyed. Their temple was taken, yet most extraordinarily, people continued to quietly, secretly, pray outside the building. Destroying physical statues and giving the temple a new function could not destroy the strength of the goddess’ powers.
On a recent visit, the temple’s loquacious volunteer caretaker, Mr. Chen, shared the temple’s post-1966 history. Hong Miao became a pharmaceutical factory warehouse in the 1970s, an anonymous shell for storage. When workmen found it difficult to move carts over the flagstones in the temple’s open courtyard, the ancient stones were simply cemented over.
In 1982, temple neighbors say that a tunnel was planned on Nanjing Road that would have destroyed the temple, tunneling underneath to reach the Bund. Soon after construction began, however, workers came across the unsettling sight of a trio of pythons lined up directly in front of the workers, eyeing them steadily. Following this incident, the project was plagued with accidents and difficulties that made it impossible to continue. The three pythons, it was whispered, were the guardians of Hong Miao, the “small dragons” that give the temple its power.
Hong Miao Revival
Following this bizarre incident, the building languished. As a temple, it lacked the size to make it a tourist site like Jing’an or Jade Buddha. On the edge of the rapid modernizations of Nanjing Road, it was simply too small, too run-down, and too old to be of any use.
Then, in 2007, during the heady pre-Expo days, when things boutique were all the rage, the state-owned Shanghai Film Group turned it into an art house theater and hip event space [6]. The Shanghai Hong Miao Art Film Center – the old temple still so famous that it was worth including in the name — opened to a great deal of fanfare, with four generations of film directors attending the opening screening of the biopic “The Go Master” by leading film director Tian Zhuangzhuang. It was a popular spot for events and screenings, for a few years, but eventually the art house theater faded from the scene.
In 2016, half a century after it had last been used as a temple, Hong Miao Temple reopened as a a Taoist study site and – in a nod to its 18th century charitable mission — the Shanghai Philanthropic Academy. On either side of the courtyard are a Taoist library and study room, and on weekends, earnest students come to read and listen to lectures. Technically, Hong Miao is no longer a temple – no priests or incense are allowed inside — but there is a shiny new statue of the goddess Guan Yin in a refurbished hall of worship, and supplicants still kneel before her.
A recent interior refurbishment has added a sparkling new entryway, but you only need to look up to see the wooden beams and columns of the old temple. The ancient flagstones in the spacious courtyard were, sadly, cemented during its tenure as a pharmaceutical factory, but cross the courtyard to the Guan Yin altar, and look down. The flagstones at your feet and the wooden posts, rich with the patina of time, date from a much earlier era. Look closely at those flagstones, and you’ll see the yin yang symbol, the concept of dualism that is one of Taoism’s basic beliefs.
Ancestor shrine to Buddhist temple to Taoist temple to warehouse to arthouse and back in 500 years, and yet nothing has changed. For Chinese, changing the function of a sacred place cannot desanctify it, or change its essence. Remove the idols, remove the their interlocutors, remove the incense, but you can’t remove the compassionate goddess who responds to those who come to her.
As Mr.
Chen, the volunteer, explains, the powers of the goddess remain strong, and
once again, a stream of worshippers can be found at Hong Miao, as it ever was.
[1] Hong Miao has gone by several names over the years. It was originally known as the Dinggou Temple 叮沟, named for the river that flowed past. Later, it became known as the Situ Temple, 司徒 a homonym for both “four” and “manage the land”, as the temple sat in the centre of four parcels of land, and was dedicated to the god of land to protect the peace; it was known by foreigners as the “Temple of the Protector of the Peace” even into the early 20th century. It became known as Hong Miao in the early 18th century, but although the characters say “Rainbow Temple”, Hong Miao is also a homonym for ‘Red Temple’, which is what many of the illiterate worshippers called it, when it was painted deep red in 1705.
[2] Ye Xiaoqing, The Dianshizhai Pictorial: Shanghai Urban Life, 1884-98 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003)
[3] Ye, Dianshizhai
[4] “Ricksha Trips Through City Worth While; Good Routes, Nanking Road Principal Thoroughfare in Shanghai” 1925, The China Press
[5] Ye, Dianshizhai
[6] “Shanghai Welcomes Art House”, Variety, June 20 2007