Wong Tai Sin Temple launches app and opens all night for worshippers on Lunar New Year's Eve
Wong Tai Sin expects big crowds as it opens doors to worshippers at 9pm on Wednesday
One of the city's biggest and busiest temples has confirmed it will again stay open all night on Lunar New Year's Eve, next Wednesday, so that worshippers can make their first offerings for the year.
Sik Sik Yuen - the Taoist, Buddhist and Confucian charity that runs the temple - said on Thursday that the temple would close at 5.30pm on Wednesday then reopen at 9pm for all-night worshipping.
Those who want to be there for the very beginning of the Year of the Goat will be able to wait in the space in front of the temple's main altar - which will accommodate 1,000 people waiting for two worshipping time slots: 11pm and midnight. It will close at 6.30pm on Thursday.
Leung Yiu-wah, chairman of Sik Sik Yuen's property management committee, expected similar visitor numbers on Lunar New Year's Eve to last year.
"Last year we had around 50,000 people. I believe [the crowd size] this year will be similar," Leung said.
The temple will enforce a one-way flow of visitors on Wednesday to control the crowd.
The usual areas for shaking fortune sticks, kneeling and leaving offerings will be closed. The temple urged worshippers not to bring large offerings such as roast pig, and families should bring no more than nine incense sticks.
The temple will also officially launch an application for Android phones today, which it has tested in previous years, providing general information about the temple and where to worship.
It plans to expand the app in summer with a function allowing people to see what the future holds by either keying in the numbers printed on their divination stick or scanning the stick with their phone to get a general explanation of what the numbers mean. But the app will provide only basic guidance; they may still need to seek advice from fortune tellers if they want a more detailed interpretation.
And believers will still have to visit the temple to shake the stick from a bamboo canister.
