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| Chiak muay thoi hee, a phrase in Teochew dialect literally means, "Eat Teochew porridge while watching a show!" |
Teochew muay or plain rice porridge, eaten with a variety of dishes that
have contrastingly stronger salty, sour or spicy flavours, is a typically
Teochew meal. This rice porridge is
virtually a watered-down version of boiled rice where individual grains of
fluffy rice remain intact in the rice broth.
Dishes served to savour with the plain porridge are cooked in the
Teochew tradition using methods like poaching, steaming and braising in recipes
that have been handed down through generations.
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| A section of Jalan Trus in front of the Gu Miao was transformed into a banquet hall for the celebration |
The first course of dishes featured
eight items like preserved olives and chopped salted vegetables, braised
peanuts, boiled salted egg halves, crunchy preserved lettuce stalks, slices of
boiled pork belly with garlic-chilly dip sauce and cubes of fu-yee or pickled beancurd paste. This was followed by more Teochew favourites
like braised duck and popular kway chap ingredients,
steamed fish to savour with taucheo
sauce and stir-fried leeks with roast pork.
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| The Johor Gu Miao is dubbed "the temple of unity" because deities revered by the five main dialect groups are housed under one roof! |
The JB Chingay parade is an annual
tradition that has been kept in this city since the 1800’s without any
interruption except during the Japanese invasion in 1942. This spectacular show has been held on such a
grand scale that it has not only become a major tourist attraction in JB with
foreign media coverage but was also filmed by the Teochew Broadcasting channel
for screening in China. The JB Chingay
was honoured as the Best Domestic Event in the 2009 Johor Tourism Awards and in
2012 it was recognised as a National Cultural Heritage.
To understand why the temple is
carefully preserved as a cultural heritage, we must look at the history of the
goodwill between the Johor royal family and the JB Chinese community. In 1844, Tan Kai Soon (1803 – 1957), a
Teochew and prominent Ngee Heng kongsi or
society leader, arrived with a large group of workers to establish the Tan chu kang in Kangkar Tebrau in the kangchu or river lord system to
cultivate pepper and gambier, the first economic crops that brought tremendous
wealth to Johor.
When early settlers from the Teochew,
Hainanese, Hakka, Cantonese and Hokkien clans came to JB, they not only brought
along their culture and farming skills but also their own brand of justice,
gangsterism and vice. The immigrants,
who call JB, Sin Sua (Teochew
dialect) or new territory, often had hostile clashes. But after a period of anarchy, the clans
finally agreed to surrender their secret society activities and lived in peace
as their worship was united in the Gu
Miao.
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| These sedan chairs were used to carry the deities on their annual tour of the city during the JB Chingay parade |
When Johor became part of the Unfederated Malay States under the British colonial authority in 1914, the kangchu system was abolished and the Ngee Heng kongsi, disbanded. As a benevolent ruler, Sultan Abu Bakar encouraged the Chinese community to live in peace and continued the goodwill relationship started by Temenggong Daeng Ibrahim.
Unlike other Chinese temples that
traditionally bear the name of a particular deity, the Johor Gu Miao is
believed to be the first Chinese temple in Malaysia to be named after a
State. The word “Johor” was incorporated
into the temple’s name in honour of the sultan and can be attributed to the
strong relationship between the Johor ruler and the Chinese immigrant community.
A version of this was published in The Malaysian Insider on 25 April 2015
