Wooden (This week's Photo Hunt theme)

After I put up my entry for last week's Photo Hunt, I went over to tnchick's site to see what would be this week's theme -- at which point, I got to realizing that quite a few of my Chi Lin Nunnery photos would have worked as well for this week's entry on account of its impressive main building being a predominantly, if not entirely, wooden structure! Still, rather than revisit that photo collection for this week's Photo Hunt entry, I'm putting up a couple of pictures of interesting traditional Chinese material culture that I took in Penang sometime last year instead.

First up is a close-up shot of two legs of old wooden furniture that can be found inside the Hainanese Temple on Muntri Street. In Imperial China, there was a strict social hierarchy that came to manifest itself even in such as individual pieces of furniture getting divided into three classes. For the record, those in my picture are recognizably second class furniture. How so? Because, their legs have been carved to resemble those of lions. Consequently, they are a class above the undecorated third class furniture but, at the same time, a class below those pieces of furniture whose higher status can be identified through their legs resembling those of those auspicious -- and mythical -- creatures known as dragons!

Next, and at the Penang Teochew Association's Ancestral Temple over in Chulia Street, generations worth of wooden ancestral tablets are on display at the alter in the building's inner most hall. At this juncture, I'd like to take the opportunity to debunk the widely-held (among Westerners) misconception that many people have that the Chinese worship their ancestors. To my mind, we don't. Rather, we venerate, honor and remember them instead. And should people think that our tradition of offering up food and drink to the ancestors is on the weird side, I'll offer up the following tale (involving an encounter that I could well imagine taking place in either Hong Kong or Penang):-

A Western man came across a Chinese man going about performing some grave-side rituals at a cemetery one day. After the Chinese man had finished laying out some food and drink in front of his ancestor's grave, the Western man went up and said, "Sir, I hope you can answer a question for me." "Certainly," replied the Chinese man, after which the Western man asked, "When is your ancestor coming up to eat the food and drink the drink?" Looking at the Western man, who had come complete to the cemetery with a bouquet of flowers, the Chinese man answered: "When your ancestor comes up to smell the flowers...!" ;b