29-Mar-2024
As noted in this week's Kuching diary, the city is currently enjoying the Seng Ong Deity birthday festivities.
The first heads-up was the flags at Hong San Si Temple on Wayang Street. But as usual, it was the Sarawak Heritage Society that filled us in on the details.
The celebrations kicked off on Wednesday, but on offer today was a "100 Auspicious Lion Dance Performance", due to take place outside the temple.
The Terns can never resist the lure of a lion...
We fortified ourselves with coffee and cake at Indah, and then headed over to watch the various prides get ready.
It was a spectacularly colourful affair:
The temple where it was all happening
And the lions...
I love how lion-dancing encompasses male and female, and a mix of ethnic groups
No celebration is complete without a good supply of food
Offerings continue throughout
And a ton of firecrackers await the deity
Lion teams would take it in turns to present themselves at the temple...
...bow...
...enter...
...reverse out (not necessarily easy -- needs a bit of help)...
...and bow and rise again
We withdrew for more coffee at Windmeal. As much as anything, this was to give our ears a rest. Lioning is an incredibly high-volume business, as dozens of troupes pound their drums and clang their cymbals:
Then we came back to witness the grand welcoming of the Seng Ong Deity from Keningau, Sabah. He flew in this morning from Kota Kinabalu. I love this tradition of the travelling deity...
Heads on... The deity is about to arrive
The lions line both sides of the street
The firecrackers herald the deity's arrival. If you thought it was loud before, you now experience a whole new level of loudness...
As the explosion point on the rope of crackers reaches them, the lions bow
And once the deity has gone by, they all follow along to the temple
We didn't actually see the deity. He was hemmed in by minders.
But the enthusiasm of the reception! As one local onlooker said to us afterwards, not even the prime minister gets such a tumultuous welcome. Quite right too...
Bottom line, it was awesome. Samuel Johnson was right: "When a woman is tired of lions, she is tired of life." Something like that, anyway. It was definitely about lions...