Chee Ying Society, Honokaʻa何诺卡阿至英会馆

Type

Overseas Daoist Temples

Location

United States · Hawaii State · Honokaʻa · Honokaa, island of Hawaiʻi, alongside Highway 24

Coordinates

20.08472, -155.47611 Map ↗

First built

No reliable documentation gives the founding date; currently unknown

Heritage status

U.S. National Register of Historic Places, NRHP #78001014 (20 July 1978)

Overview

The Chee Ying Society is located in the sugarcane district of Honokaa on the north coast of the island of Hawaiʻi, and is a branch organization of the Pacific network of the Hongmen. The association hall contains a ritual shrine, but the deity or deities principally venerated there are not recorded in the documentation, and this entry makes no inference on the point. When it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978, the listing cited both 'architecture' and 'religion' as grounds — one of the few cases in which a Chinese lodge shrine has been formally recognized at the federal level as having religious-historical value. The Hongmen (in its Chee Kung Tong and Triad forms) served multiple functions in overseas Chinese society from the late nineteenth to early twentieth century — as mutual-aid society, trade guild, and secret society at once — and its lodges commonly maintained Guandi altars, drawing on the narrative of loyalty and righteousness from the Oath of the Peach Garden as the religious anchor of the organization's ethics — a form that, strictly speaking, belongs to folk religion and associational culture rather than to organized Daoism.

Highlights

• A branch of the Pacific Hongmen network on the island of Hawaiʻi
• The association hall contains a ritual shrine
• 'Religion' is cited among the grounds for its NRHP listing