Hong Kong's busiest temple belongs to a god who arrived as a refugee. Wong Tai Sin, the Great Immortal Wong, began as Wong Cho Ping, a fourth century shepherd of Zhejiang who, in the Taoist hagiography, attained immortality in mountain seclusion and could turn white boulders into sheep. His modern cult grew in nineteenth century Guangdong around spirit written oracles, and in 1915 a Taoist master carried the god's portrait south to Hong Kong ahead of the mainland's upheavals.
The shrine settled at Kowloon in 1921, run by the Sik Sik Yuen association, and grew with the city around it; when refugees flooded the district after 1949, the temple of the healer god who answers every prayer, as his epithet promises, became the spiritual insurance office of a migrant city. Devotees crowd the forecourt daily to practise kau chim, shaking cylinders of numbered bamboo sticks until one falls, then carrying its number to the arcade of soothsayers who interpret the corresponding oracle slip for health, marriage, business or emigration. The complex embodies Hong Kong's religious synthesis: Taoist in its god and liturgy, it keeps a Buddhist hall to Guanyin and a Confucian hall to the sage, teaching the unity of the three traditions, and its charitable arm runs clinics and schools. At Lunar New Year the race to plant the first incense of the year at Wong Tai Sin makes the evening news, a folk barometer of the city's hopes.