What are Wong Tai Sin fortune sticks?

Drawing a numbered stick and reading the matching verse is called qiuqian (求籤) in Mandarin and kau cim in Cantonese. At Wong Tai Sin each tube holds 100 bamboo sticks, and every verse has four lines of seven characters.

A 2026 newspaper column by the temple's abbot describes the sequence. The person prays, states their details and question, and shakes the tube at about a 45-degree angle until one stick falls out. Some then throw moon blocks to confirm it. The number is noted and the printed verse is collected.

The column says the temple charges nothing for the lots and has no part in the paid interpretation stalls outside it.

Each lot also carries a title, often drawn from a story. Lot 1 is Jiang Gong Is Made Minister (姜公封相). The temple's website sets out the title, the grade, the verse, an explanation and short notes on topics such as work, travel and marriage.

Wong Tai Sin is the Cantonese form of Huang Daxian, the Great Immortal Huang, a title given to Huang Chuping (黃初平). Hong Kong Memory, a government heritage site, names Ge Hong's Biographies of the Immortals, from the Eastern Jin, as the earliest account of him.

The story is about a shepherd. At 15 he follows a Daoist into the mountains near Jinhua in present-day Zhejiang. More than 40 years later his elder brother finds him and asks about the sheep, and Huang turns white stones into a flock.

A Southern Song writer, Ni Shouyue, catalogued the cliffs, caves and shrines of Mount Redpine that were tied to this story, according to Elizabeth Smithrosser of the University of Oxford.

Hong Kong Memory says he was worshipped around Jinhua as an immortal associated with healing and rain, and that the cult spread to South China in the Ming and Qing dynasties.

In 1915 Liang Ren'an (梁仁庵, Leung Yan-am in Cantonese) and his son fled fighting in Guangdong and came to Hong Kong, where they set up an altar. They came from the Pu Qing altar (普慶壇, Po Hing Tan in Cantonese) at Xiqiaoshan.

In 1921 Liang founded a private temple at Chuk Yuen Village in Kowloon, with the Sik Sik Yuen organization to run it. Hong Kong Memory dates the full opening to the public to 1956. The belief and its customs joined China's national intangible cultural heritage list in 2014.

Worship there honors Daoism, Confucianism and Buddhism together. Hong Kong Memory notes that the temple offered prescriptions for illness in the past as well as fortune sticks.

The abbot's column says the temple's lots were inherited from the Pu Qing altar at Xiqiao, the same altar the Liang family left. It also places lot texts in general in Daoist temples by the Five Dynasties period. That second statement concerns the practice as a whole and says nothing about this set.

The verses on this site were read from named web transcriptions. The temple also publishes its lots online, and we spot-checked two against our text. Lot 1 matched in title, grade and verse. Lot 50 matched in title and grade, but its last line differs by one character: the temple reads 卻也辭 where the transcriptions read 卻不辭, and the difference changes the sense.

Nothing we read names an author or a date for the verses. The link to the Pu Qing altar is the temple's own statement, and we have not seen a printing from that altar, so we cannot say whether the verses were composed there or reached it from somewhere else.

We have compared all 100 lots with the temple's website, and we have not read a paper printing. We also could not open Graeme Lang and Lars Ragvald's 1993 book The Rise of a Refugee God, which Wikipedia cites, so nothing here relies on it.

Grades do not line up across sources. The abbot's column lists five grades, while Chinese Wikipedia, citing popular books on the lots, lists six with its own counts.

Huang's dates are unsettled. Wikipedia gives about 328 to 386 and also reports a range of about 284 to 364, while Smithrosser says only the early 300s. These are dates for a figure known through legend. Accounts also differ on where the first altar stood: Hong Kong Memory says Central and Wikipedia says Wan Chai.