What are Guan Di fortune sticks?

Drawing a numbered stick and reading the matching verse is called qiuqian (求籤). A person holds a question in mind, shakes a cup until one stick rises, and reads the verse with that number. Two moon blocks are then thrown to confirm the lot.

The set is often called the Guan Di hundred lots (關帝百首籤詩). A 2013 study of temples in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, by Lin Wen-chin reports it as the most common text at Taiwan's century-old major temples, and says its use reaches beyond temples where Guan Di is the main god.

A modern entry can carry much more than the verse. Lin lists a pair of calendar signs, a lot name, a story, a grade, the poem, and several layers of commentary, including ones headed Sacred Meaning (聖意) and Dongpo's Explanation (東坡解).

Guan Yu was a general of the third century who was later made a god and given the titles Lord Guan and Emperor Guan. Daoists, Buddhists and Confucian scholars all revered him, according to the scholar Ekaterina Zavidovskaya. She gives his death as 219, while Wikipedia places it in early 220.

Lin relates how Buddhists claimed him. The novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms has his spirit enlightened by the monk Pujing at Jade Spring Hill. Lin also says a monastery built there in 676 took him as its guardian. Other studies date the temple on that hill to about 592 and the oldest known record of the link to an inscription of 802.

Imperial rank came late. Lin reports that the Wanli Emperor raised him to the rank of emperor in 1590 and gave him a longer title in 1614. A Chinese survey of the gods, translated into Russian in 1907, described Guan Di temples as covering nearly all of Qing China.

Lin traces the hundred lots to a work titled Efficacious Lots of the King of Jiangdong (護國嘉濟江東王靈籤), which appeared in the Southern Song. The King of Jiangdong was Shi Gu (石固), a god honored at a temple in Ganzhou.

A copy sits in the Ming dynasty Daoist Canon (正統道藏). It opens with a stele text by Song Lian dated 1371. The stele says the verses were written in the Baoqing era (1225 to 1227) by Fu Ye (傅燁), an official of Gan County. Lin adds that the explanatory sections were not part of the earliest form and appear in the Canon text.

We read lots 1 and 100 of the Canon text in a Wikisource transcription. Both match the same lots on this site, apart from a variant form of one character. Lot 100 speaks as a heavenly master of thunder and rain (雷雨師) and does not mention Guan Di.

Lin cites a Qing note by Lu Zhan (盧湛), by way of a modern book. It says a monk of Yanqing Temple in Ningbo compiled a set of lots under Guan Di's name. That set failed to spread because most temples already used the Jiangdong lots, and temples then took the Jiangdong lots and renamed them for Guan Di.

Lin reports that the versions now used in Taiwan come from a printing made in the Guangxu reign (1875 to 1908) by a board member of the Tonghuai Guan Yue Temple in Quanzhou, who also ran a bookshop.

The Daoist Culture Centre database says the Emperor Guan set was revised over hundreds of years, and that it has an extra king stick beyond its 100 poems. This site gives the 100 numbered lots and no king stick.

One Wikisource transcription used on this site is labeled as a Qing work and links to a scan of a printing from the Niu family of Gusu. Its talk page names a facsimile as the reference text. We have not compared either against the transcription.

We have seen no Southern Song copy. The credit to Fu Ye rests on a Ming stele text written about 150 years later, and only lots 1 and 100 were checked against the Canon text, so we cannot say the whole set is unchanged.

The story of the renaming reaches us through Lin's summary of another book describing a Qing note. We have not read the note, and we found no document that dates the change of title.

Lot 100 names the Master of Thunder and Rain, and we could not establish who that figure is or why the set speaks in that voice. One online reference says tradition credits the verses to that figure in the Song and the commentary to Su Dongpo, and that neither claim can be traced to a reliable source. We found nothing better.