Yaumatei Tin Hau Temple

About this audio guide

This guide to the Yaumatei Tin Hau Temple in Hong Kong opens with a puzzle: a shrine to the goddess of the sea now sits nearly three kilometres inland. You'll hear how fishermen from the Tanka boat communities built the complex in the eighteen sixties on what was then Yau Ma Tei's waterfront, and the legend behind Tin Hau herself, a young woman named Lin Mo whose trance is said to have saved her father and brothers from a typhoon. The guide also follows how decades of land reclamation pushed the shoreline outward while the temple stayed fixed in place. Look for the old banyan trees shading the square as incense drifts through the branches.