The pantheon · Folk Deities (民間信仰)
Mazu
媽祖 · Mazu (Wade-Giles: Ma-tsu)
Folk religion
The deified sea goddess who guards sailors and fishermen.
A protector of seafarers, worshipped along the whole China coast and across the diaspora. She began as a real woman, Lin Moniang of tenth-century Fujian, and rose through centuries of imperial titles to Tianhou, Empress of Heaven.
- Portfolio
- Protection of seafarers · Fishermen and coastal communities · Safe passage across water
- Observance
- Mazu's birthday, the twenty-third day of the third lunar month, is the great Mazu festival, marked by temple fairs and — most spectacularly in Taiwan — days-long pilgrimages in which her palanquin is carried across the island while devotees kneel in the road for the sedan chair to pass over them. Fishermen and sailors traditionally ask her blessing before putting to sea, and ships and harbours keep shrines to her. Offerings are the usual incense, fruit and flowers. Observance differs sharply between Meizhou, Taiwan, Fujian and overseas communities, each with its own lineage temple and customs.
How to recognise them
A serene, seated empress in imperial robes and a flat-topped mortarboard crown hung with strings of beads, hands holding a ritual tablet. Her face is often painted red or, in some temples, black from centuries of incense smoke. She is flanked by two demon-generals she subdued and took into her service: Qianliyan, Thousand-Mile Eyes, and Shunfeng'er, With-the-Wind Ears, who spot ships in distress far out at sea.
Mazu was born, tradition says, around 960 on Meizhou Island off the Fujian coast, the daughter of a fishing family, and named Lin Moniang — Silent Girl, because she did not cry as a baby. She was a gifted swimmer and, the stories say, a shamaness who could foretell the weather. In the most famous episode she fell into a trance at her loom to rescue her father and brothers from a storm at sea; woken before the work was done, she saved some but not all.
She is said to have died young, around 987, either from illness or by ascending a mountain and vanishing into the clouds. Fishermen and sailors of the Fujian coast, who could least afford to lose a protector who understood the sea, kept her memory and began to pray to her before voyages. Sightings of a red-robed woman guiding ships through storms multiplied. What had been one island's local spirit spread port by port along the trade routes of the South China Sea.
From the twelfth century the imperial court began granting her titles, each promotion raising her rank: Princess of Supernatural Favour, then Consort, then in 1684 Tianhou, Empress of Heaven. Historians see in this a state quietly standardising a useful coastal cult, wrapping a local goddess in official honours to bind the frontier to the centre. Today thousands of Mazu temples stretch from Fujian and Taiwan — where her pilgrimages draw enormous crowds — to Southeast Asia and Chinatowns worldwide. Her worship is folk at root and imperial in dress.
Nearby
Written from
- Standardizing the Gods: The Promotion of T'ien Hou Along the South China Coast, 960–1960 — James L. Watson, in Popular Culture in Late Imperial China, 1985
- Chinese Gods: The Unseen World of Spirits and Demons — Keith Stevens, 1997
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