Klenteng Ing Hok Kiong, Bagansiapiapi峇眼亚比英福宫

Type: Overseas Daoist Temples
Location: Indonesia · Riau province · Bagansiapiapi · Bagansiapiapi, Kabupaten Rokan Hilir, Riau
First built: Late 19th century · The temple's own account holds that it is over a hundred years old; there is no reliable record of the exact founding year.
Heritage status: The Bakar Tongkang (Burning of the Royal Boat) designated a national-level tourism festival of Indonesia

Overview

Ing Hok Kiong is the oldest of the more than one hundred Chinese temples in Bagansiapiapi, Riau Province. Tradition holds that Bagansiapiapi was founded by a group of Hokkien (some say Tong'an) fishermen who drifted ashore and settled there in the nineteenth century; in the early twentieth century it was an important fishing port of world rank. This temple is the central site of the locally famous Bakar Tongkang ('Burning of the Barge') ritual — a localization of the Hokkien rite of 'sending off the plague-king boat,' locally called Go Ge Cap Lak, the sixteenth day of the fifth lunar month: each year on that day, worshippers carry a wooden king-boat in procession around the town before burning it, divining the coming year's livelihood from the direction the mast falls — toward the sea for those who make their living at sea, toward land for those in land-based trades. The custom derives from the Hokkien coastal cult of sending off the plague king's boat, and has evolved here into an annual reenactment of the community's founding memory; since the 2010s it has been listed by the Indonesian government as a national tourism festival. The Chinese make up an extremely high proportion of Bagansiapiapi's population, one of the highest of any town in Indonesia.

Highlights

The oldest of the more than one hundred temples in Bagansiapiapi
Central site of the Bakar Tongkang ('Burning of the Barge') ritual
Boat burned each year on the sixteenth day of the fifth lunar month, mast direction divining livelihood
A local evolution of the Hokkien cult of sending off the plague king's boat
One of the towns with the highest proportion of ethnic Chinese in Indonesia

References