黄大仙祠

This guide to Wong Tai Sin Temple in Guangzhou opens with a shepherd boy named Huang Chuping, born around the year 328, who was pulled into a cave on Red Pine Mountain at fifteen to learn Daoist alchemy. You'll hear how he spent forty years boiling cinnabar in search of immortality, the same poisonous ore that killed China's first emperor at thirty nine, and what nineteenth-century merchants believed about the healer he became. It traces the temple they built for him in 1899, its wartime destruction, and the pillared hall that replaced it decades later.