Worship
Starting from Fujian, worship of Mazu spread to the neighboring coastal provinces of Zhejiang and Guangdong, and thence to all coastal areas of mainland China. With emigration and especially the Chinese diaspora of the 19th and 20th centuries, it further spread to Taiwan, Vietnam, Ryukyu, Japan, and South East Asia; the role of Mazu as patron of the seas ensured that newly arrived immigrants often erected temples to her first, to give thanks for arriving safely. Today, worship of Mazu is also found in other countries with sizeable populations from these regions. In total, there are around 1,500 Mazu temples in 26 countries of the world.
Read more about this topic: Mazu (goddess)
Famous quotes containing the word worship:
“We worship the aesthetic, but we do not have faith in it.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“The worship of Mammon may be vulgar or immoral, but it persists while other religions falter and disappear.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Both nuns and mothers worship images,
But those the candles light are not as those
That animate a mother’s reveries,
But keep a marble or a bronze repose.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)