Tua Pek Kong Temple Tanjong Tokong

This guide to the Tua Pek Kong Temple in Tanjong Tokong, Penang Island, opens in the mid-1700s with a storm that blew a small boat off course, carrying a Hakka scholar named Zhang Li and two companions away from their intended crossing to Sumatra and onto this empty stretch of coast, where they built a fishing settlement. It follows Zhang Li's death on this spot, and the decades that passed before the village he founded began to prosper and its people decided he had been watching over them all along. You'll hear how that decision, made no later than 1792, became the root of a cult with temples across the region. Look for the graves near the temple grounds, where local tradition holds Zhang Li still rests.