spill container; spills (ritual & belief: religious buildings & furnishings)

Tubular bamboo container with decorative ridges at the ends, containing 21 spills, kau cim. Some of the sticks have Chinese characters on one side.

Each fortune stick is a numbered section of bamboo kept with many others in a bamboo cylinder. Early in the New Year the petitioner visits the temple to find answers to his questions about the year to come. He shakes the cylinder in such a way that one of the bamboo sticks falls out. Its number is then checked against a series of written fortunes kept in the temple.

object
MUSEUM NUMBER
nn8294
PLACE
COLLECTION
MEASUREMENTS
overall: 265 mm x 63 mm
MATERIAL/TECHNIQUE
bamboo; pigment
CATEGORY
Anthropology: Ethnography
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Collection Information

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