Chinese temple usually has a featured roof. It is usually green or yellow and is decorated with figures of divinities and lucky symbols such as dragons and carp. Stone lions often guard the entrance to the temple. Inside is a small courtyard with a large censer where incense and paper offerings are burnt. Beyond is the main hall with an altar table, often with an intricately carved front. Here you’ll find offerings of fruit and drinks. Behind is the altar with its images framed by red brocade embroidered with gold characters. Depending on the size and wealth of the temple there are gongs, drums, side altars and adjoining rooms with shrines to different gods, chapels for prayers to the dead and displays of funerary plaques. There are also living quarters for the temple keepers.

The dominant colours in a Chinese temple are red, gold or yellow, and green. The orange to red colour range represents joy and festivity. (Red is the colour of marriage and in the old days the bridegroom sent for his bride in a red sedan chair. Today it’s a hire-car with red ribbons.) White represents purity and is also the colour of death. Green signifies harmony, of fundamental importance to the Chinese. Yellow and gold stand for heavenly glory. Grey and black are the colours of disaster and grief.

There is no set time for prayer and no communal service except for funerals. Worshippers enter the temple whenever they want to make offerings, pray for help or give thanks. The temple keeper, in casual singlet and sandals, earns his living by selling joss sticks or spirals of joss which are suspended from the ceiling and burn for two weeks.

The temple keeper and/or a medium attached to the temple also charges for interpreting fortune papers. There are numbered to correspond with sticks of wood which the worshipper shakes in a cylindrical box called a Qian until one falls out. Another way of getting advice from the gods is tossing Bei, two pieces of wood with irregular sides which indicate a positive or negative response to a question. Such forms of fortune-telling are direct appeals to the gods for knowledge about the future – the fall of the fortune sticks or the Bei is regarded as the voice of the gods.

In addition, temples often have shelves filled with 12 animals representing each years of the Chinese calendar. Worshippers make offerings to the god of the year they were born, so that they would get blessed. It is said that the ‘Animal Years’ chart originated when Buddha commanded all the beasts of the earth to assemble before him. Only 12 animals came and they were rewarded by having their names given to a specific year. Buddha also decided to name each year in the order in which the animals arrived – the first was the rat. Then the ox, tiger, rabbit and so on.