People of my age who are fond of schlocky movies may remember the John Carpenter/Kurt Russel classic, "Big Trouble in Little China". In that movie the Chinese sidekick tells our hero in a moment of peril, "the Chinese have a lot of hells". I always thought this was Hollywood color, but it turns out to be true. Almost. Technically it's more correct to say that the Taoists have a lot of hells. Or, to be perfectly accurate, that they have one hell with a lot of departments. There is no heaven, only hell. Some parts of hell are, well, hellish, while others are not so bad.

In fact, Taoist hell really looks like a mirror of earthly government. It's mostly bureaucracies, some of which happen to be in charge of things like "implementing fifteen kinds of violent death" (十五种恶死司). Others are in charge of anodyne things like "signing documents".

I mention this because yesterday Mrs. Imagethief and I went to the Dongyue Taoist temple on Chaowai. This temple is well known for having life-size dioramas of no less than 76 departments of hell. Each diorama features the presiding hellish magistrate along with various attendants, ranging from infernal hell bunnies (no kidding) to people having their tongues cut out to administrative assistants.

In the manner of Chinese temples everywhere, you can buy little prayer-tags-cum-donations to leave at various altars, or in this case at various hellish departments. Given that the departments aren't all, strictly speaking, infernal, the number of prayer tags left at each is a good indication of the priorities of the praying Chinese. Thus I was interested to see that the hellish "department of wilderness preservation" (the one that hell bunny comes from) rated four prayers. The "department for accumulation of wealth" rated countless tens of thousands, and was definitely the star attraction among hellish departments. At least wilderness got the four. Reassuringly, many of the most infernal departments, such as "betrayal", had no prayers.

Mrs. Imagethief and I were not at the temple for the hellish departments, however. We were there for the annual temple fair, a Chinese New Year ritual of cheesy carnival games, acrobatic performances and sugary treats. We hadn't been for three years, since we're usually back in Singapore at this time of year. It was good fun to pop into one for a couple of hours. It's kind of guilty fun, like CCTV New Year galas. The absolute hit of the fair was an old guy running a mouse circus in which mice performed various tricks on ropes and little scaffolds. Only a modest amount of prodding with sticks was involved. (This is the year of the rat, and the Chinese don't really differentiate between rats and mice, other than to note the size.)

As always, I took a pile of photos. I've posted thirteen of them online. Enjoy, and happy new year.

Mommy, is this sequin infernal?