Introduction

The Hakka is a unique ethnic group in China, belonging to a branch of the Han Chinese people. Historically, because of wars, disasters, and migrations, some people migrated from the central plains of China to live in the more remote mountainous areas of the southern provinces and gathered together, and later these people and their descendants were called Hakka people. During the Ming and Qing dynasties, a large number of the Hakka people began to migrate overseas. At present, approximately 60 million Hakka people are distributed worldwide, with larger Hakka groups in Southeast Asia, North America, Europe, and Africa.

In the struggle with nature over generations, the Hakka people treated all things as deities. Bo Gong is a type of common local deity in traditional Hakka society, such as the Land Bo Gong and Banyan Bo Gong. Bo Gong worship is almost ubiquitous, becoming a distinctive folk belief in the Hakka region. Along with the massive migration of the Hakka people overseas during the Ming and Qing dynasties, the belief in Tua Pek Kong also spread to Southeast Asia. The Hakka people not only established a Chinese community in Southeast Asia but also formed a cultural community with unique folk beliefs based on common historical memory.

Most of the early Hakka immigrants were engaged in agricultural labor, except for some of them engaged in the traditional maritime trade and mineral mining industry. Land was the basic material living space, and the Hakka society's hope for the blessing of the land god was centrally manifested in the worship of Tua Pek Kong. The origins of the Hakka's belief in Tua Pek Kong vary from country to country in Southeast Asia. In order to pray for good health and prosperity the Indonesian Hakka started to worship the guardian deity of their own land, Tua Pek Kong, in 1823, and founded the “Tua Pek Kong Temple” near the market (PASAR PAGI). The Malaysian Tua Pek Kong originated from the legend that Hakka ancestors Zhang Li, Qiu Zhaoxiang and Ma Fuchun took a sailing ship to Malaysia in 1745 to open up land on the island of Penang. After the death of these three, the Hakka people of Penang built the Thai Pak Koong Temple in 1799 to commemorate the death of these three people. Most of the Hakka people in Singapore immigrated from Dutch Malaysia after 1819, and their belief in Tua Pek Kong comes from the ancestral legends and the land god named Fu De in their hometown. The origin of the early Hakka immigrants’ belief in Tua Pek Kong was distinctly regional, and then it merged with the belief in the traditional land god, completing the identity overlap between the “Hakka ancestors” and the “land god”, and gaining wider dissemination.

In the modern information society, mass media has become an important vehicle for constructing religious media images. For example, Rendleman (2008) systematically examined four evangelical Christian images in American movies since 1970 and found that the religious images in people’s minds are always consistent with the images in the images. Emons et al. (2009) investigated the relationship between religious practices in Dutch society and the socio-cultural trends presented by Dutch TV programs and found that people’s perceptions of religious images in TV programs are always stronger than their perceptions of religious roles and concepts in real society. Caldarelli (2019) examined 100 of the videos made by the young producers involved in the “Looking China” project, founding that it is possible to create a space of knowledge on the sharing of “the other” and of the Chinese Culture through the videos. It can be seen that the mass media can not only enrich the forms of presentation and channels of communication of religious beliefs but also provide a new perspective and window to explore the plurality and change of religious beliefs.

The religious beliefs of overseas the Hakka communities are also reflected in various types of video texts. In addition to traditional documentary TV programs and documentaries, there are a number of self-media documentary videos about Southeast Asian Hakka Tua Pek Kong on social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok. These videos constitute an unconventional database of the daily lives of the Hakka immigrants in Southeast Asia. This article primarily focuses on the research of the practice of Tua Pek Kong belief in Southeast Asia, especially in Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia, based on textual analysis. We searched for documentary videos related to Southeast Asian Tua Pek Kong from media platforms such as CCTV, TTV, CTV, TVBS, Astro, IDMB, YouTube, including factual TV programs, documentaries, and self-media documentary videos. We conducted a thorough review of each video text collected, ensuring that they adhere to the principles of factuality and mainly describe the Hakka Tua Pek Kong belief in Southeast Asia. Finally, we screened out 12 qualified video texts. This article aims to explore the ritual inheritance and cultural functions of the Hakka Tua Pek Kong belief in Southeast Asia through the analysis of these factual video texts.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that academics have examined the Hakka religious beliefs in Southeast Asia based on documentary images. Examining folk beliefs from documentary images is a new research perspective, which can enrich the study of overseas transmission of Hakka culture. Through the images, we find that Bo Gong is a common local deity in Chinese Hakka societies. After spreading to Southeast Asia, it has been called Tua Pek Kong, and this important religious belief can often be seen in the images of Southeast Asian Hakka. Through the belief of Tua Pek Kong, the Hakka people have realized the connection within the community, which also shows the localization of the beliefs and the fusion of different races and cultures. Finally, Tua Pek Kong has become the common cultural symbol of Southeast Asian Chinese society, and it plays an important role in soothing the soul.

Southeast Asian Hakka Tua Pek Kong faith rituals presented in documentary images

Video images can record and showcase the evolution in the life of a region or ethnic group and thus have vital anthropological significance. With the Hakka ethnic group as the main subject of expression, Hakka images primarily reflect the social life of the Hakka people and communities, record the historical changes of the Hakka people, and present the folk customs and religious beliefs of the Hakka people. Tua Pek Kong is frequently seen in the images of the Hakka people in Southeast Asia as the main deity of overseas Hakka worship. The video narratives of Tua Pek Kong’s beliefs provide valuable historical texts for the contemporary dissemination and academic exploration of the Hakka folklore. At present, there are few studies on the beliefs of Tua Pek Kong based on video texts. In the following article, we will analyze the rituals and cultural functions of the Hakka Tua Pek Kong worship in Southeast Asia, referencing the video materials listed in Table 1.

Table 1 Reference list of video materials on Tua Pek Kong worship in Southeast Asia
Full size table

Hakka Tua Pek Kong beliefs in Southeast Asia in daily life

The documentary presentation of Tua Pek Kong worship in the videos of the Hakka people in Southeast Asia reflects the perspective of daily life. This narrative perspective emphasizes the return to daily life; the subject of daily life is human beings. Therefore, the return to everyday life means the return to the realm of humanity (Dong 2007). Video images of the Hakka people in Southeast Asia participate in the narrative and construction of the daily life of the Hakka ethnic group through visual reproduction. As seen in the images, Tua Pek Kong is regarded as a regional Southeast Asian guardian deity who dominates the land, such as self-media blogger Uncle James, who interviewed a number of devotees at the ceremony and said, “When life is hard, you want to rely on the Gods to show you the way.”

Most Southeast Asian Hakka people place a Tua Pek Kong shrine in their homes, mostly in the hall, usually facing the front door. On normal days, many Hakka people routinely pay homage Tua Pek Kong, and some pay homage twice a day: once in the morning and once in the evening. On the 1st or 15th day of every lunar calendar, most Hakka people will pay homage to Tua Pek Kong. If it is the Chinese New Year or other vital festivals, separate offerings will be purchased for the service. In addition to a Tua Pek Kong shrine at home, Tua Pek Kong temples have been built in communities where the Hakka people live together. The ropes hanging from the beams inside the temple are filled with incense offered by the people; the incense is constantly burned, and the lamps are always on during normal days. Many Tua Pek Kong temples enjoy prestige in the community, and local people also invite Gods from different ethnic groups into the temple. Therefore, some temples have a main hall dedicated to Tua Pek Kong, who is the main deity, and side halls are dedicated to some subordinate Gods, such as Guanyu (Kwan Tai), Qi Tian Da Sheng, and the Tiger Deity. The subordinate Gods worshiped in each temple vary slightly and are primarily worshiped according to their needs and beliefs.

On the 1st and 15th days of the lunar calendar, there are activities such as beating gongs and playing pipa, erhu, and xylophone to enhance the atmosphere of the festival. People line up to offer incense or oil to Tua Pek Kong and raise incense in front of the statue to wish for blessings. Some of the temples have a “lucky money borrowing” activity on the 1st and 15th days of the lunar calendar or on the birthday of Tua Pek Kong, which stems from the folk belief that “borrowing a red packet” from a temple can attract wealth.

Self-media bloggers often focus on the daily rituals of Hakka Tua Pek Kong in Southeast Asia, so that the Tua Pek Kong temples in the videos not only provide a certain geographic landscape and ritual scenario but also create a sense of reality and “virtual co-presence” for the online viewers. The videos record the various details of Tua Pek Kong worship in daily life and complete the ritual performance in the interaction between people and “deities”, people and objects, and people and people. In the practice of faith in daily life, the Hakka people of Southeast Asia have produced and constructed a complete set of belief systems based on the demands of life and life experience.

The birthday and Chneah Hoay ceremony of Tua Pek Kong temple in Malaysia

Tua Pek Kong Temple in Hai Zhu Yu is one of the most historically significant temples in Malaysia (Zhang et al. 2014). In 2012, Jeanette Kong’s documentary “Hakka Association Documentary” revealed the origins of the oldest Tua Pek Kong Temple in Malaysia, the Tua Pek Kong Temple in Penang. The documentary used a lot of historical footage to visualize the early Hakka immigrants in Southeast Asia and tell the story of the myth of the Hakka ancestor. In 1745, during the Qianlong period, the Hakka people Zhang Li, Qiu Zhaoxiang, and Ma Fuchun arrived in Malaysia by sailing ship. It is said that they were the first Chinese to arrive in Penang. When the British established a colony in Penang in 1786, a significant number of Chinese immigrants began to arrive. After the deaths of the three pioneers, the Hakka people in Penang built a temple in 1799 to commemorate them, which developed into today’s Tua Pek Kong Temple in Hai Zhu Yu (Kuang 1958). Later, owing to the inconvenience of transportation, Hock Teik Cheng Sin Temple was built in 1801 as a secondary palace.

The 16th day of the second lunar month is the birth anniversary of Tua Pek Kong of Hai Zhu Yu in Penang. The celebration lasts for 4 days. The furnace-cleaning ceremony is held in the evening of February 14, and on February 15, Tua Pek Kong is welcomed from the Hock Teik Cheng Sin Temple on King Street and goes on parade to the main palace of the Tua Pek Kong Temple in Hai Zhu Yu. On February 16, Tua Pek Kong is worshiped in a ceremony for the birth of a God at the main palace, and on February 17, Tua Pek Kong returns to Hock Teik Cheng Sin Temple (Chen 2020).

In addition to the regular celebration of Tua Pek Kong’s birth, the “Chneah Hoay Ceremony” is a vital Tua Pek Kong-related ritual activity in the first month of the lunar calendar. In 2007, Huang Qiaoli’s documentary “Roots” won the Best Documentary Director Award at the 6th Anugerah Oskar Malaysia 2007. Through a combination of real-life rituals and documentary images, the documentary recreates the process of how the fire invocation ceremony, which was only allowed for members of secret societies, evolved into the “Tua Pek Kong Fire Invitation,” which is the first of its kind to be witnessed by the whole of Penang.

Every year, on the eve of the Lantern Festival, the locals organize the “Chneah Hoay of Tua Pek Kong” without exception. The Gods are “invisible” and “absent” objects to human beings, yet they are “genuinely” present in the ritual field (Meng 2020). People’s ritual acts and devotional imaginations of the Tua Pek Kong deity lend sanctity to the entire ritual space. Connaughton (2000) proposed the concept of “sacred time” for the rhetoric of re-enactment. The celebration of fixed moments connects the worshipers’ perception of time through the act of re-enactment, integrating and blending the sanctity and secularization of rituals while constructing the symbolic meaning of an auspicious date and time.

At noon on the 14th day of the first month of the lunar calendar, people take incense burners, floats, and the golden body of Tua Pek Kong to Tua Pek Kong Temple in Hai Zhu Yu, Penang, to prepare for the annual Chneah Hoay Ceremony. On that night, people use a reef in the sea of Hoi Chu Island as a reference, and when the tide floods the reef, it indicates an auspicious time for the ceremony. First, the iron fence of the temple is closed, and then all the lights inside the temple are extinguished. The worshipers can only “listen” to the mysterious ceremony inside the temple through the iron fence. The height of the flames is indicative of the mystery of luck or misfortune in the coming year. The moment the sacred fire rises is the advent of the “sacred moment”; this process is the specific performance of the “sacred event”. The sacred and secular, reverence and blessing, ritual and revelry are mixed together (Lu 2021), connecting the heavenly, earthly, human, and deity systems of Tua Pek Kong worship over thousands of years, inadvertently connecting individual and collective emotional space and permitting faith to be passed on.

Singapore’s Tua Pek Kong birthday

Most temples in Singapore hold the “Tua Pek Kong’s Birthday” ceremony on the second day of the second month of the lunar calendar to pray for good fortune, luck, wealth, peace, or a good harvest for farming. Loyang Tua Pek Kong Temple is one of the most revered temples in the Chinese community in Singapore and is a gathering place for worshipers during festivals. Its history can be traced back to the 1980s. Previously, the idol was placed under a beach tree in the fishing village of Loyang, and the villagers moved the idol onto an iron box to worship it. As the number of worshipers increased, the villagers took it upon themselves to build a small temple of zinc plates in which they placed the statues of Tua Pek Kong and other deities. In 1996, a fire destroyed the small temple, yet only the deities were left intact. In 2000, worshipers jointly built a spectacular temple on the beach, which was named Loyang Tua Pek Kong Temple.

The blogger of the YouTube video site has visited a number of Tua Pek Kong temples in Singapore. As seen in the self-media documentary video, Loyang Tua Pek Kong Temple is dedicated to Tua Pek Kong; the subordinate deities include the Goddess of Mercy and Buddha. Moreover, there is the Hindu Temple, where Lord Ganesha, the elephant deity, is the main deity, and Na tuk kong, a Malay God. It is one of the few temples in Singapore where Hindu and Chinese deities are worshiped together, taking in the different cultures of the Chinese, Malay, and Indian people. The temple is open 24 h a day. Apart from the Chinese believers, there are devotees of other races who come to worship. Such integrated cross-worship is a distinctive feature of Loyang Tua Pek Kong Temple.

Self-media blogger Uncle James has visited the Luoyang Tua Pek Kong Temple and showed us the Tua Pek Kong Birthday Ceremony through the video he shot. The temple holds a grand festival around the second day of the second lunar month every year. In Singapore, the more prosperous Tua Pek Kong temples have a permanent stage. The singing of traditional Chinese operas is a common entertainment program in temples to celebrate the birth anniversary of Tua Pek Kong. The “divine occasion” is the “original occasion” of traditional Chinese opera, and religious sacrifice is its primary performance scene (Yi 2010). The theatre stage in the Tua Pek Kong Temple is used to “entertain” the deities during the festival, and the opera performance during Tua Pek Kong’s birth anniversary serves functions such as sacrifices to the deities, celebration and entertainment, and the maintenance of order.

In recent years, the urbanization of Singapore has led to a reduction in the space available for most temples, while Tua Pek Kong Temple in the Pulau Ubin Fo Shan Teng still houses the largest fixed theatre in Singapore. With the change of the times, modern pop music has gained popularity among the general public. The singing stage has flourished since the 1970s, and shows on the singing stage have gained popularity during temple festivals. As such, some modern entertainment elements result in the final night of the Tua Pek Kong Temple in the Pulau Ubin Fo Shan Teng during the birth anniversary celebration being a night of singing. This type of entertainment has contributed to the development of the diversity of the Tua Pek Kong festival, and it has been disseminated in a way that is acceptable to the modern public and has been integrated into the festival life of the public. Such celebrations are based on the worship of small traditions and highlight the theme of “people”. The small traditions of religious beliefs and the large traditions of cultural adaptation to political tendencies intermingle to present a multicultural social picture of the Tua Pek Kong culture in Singapore.

Lantern festival parade in Singkawang, Indonesia

The city of Singkawang in Borneo, Indonesia, is home to a significant Chinese population and is known as the Chinese town of Indonesia. Singkawang is known as the city of a thousand temples, and the Central Tua Pek Kong Temple in downtown Singkawang is the oldest Hakka temple in the area, with a history spanning over 200 years (Cao 2014). Liu Jiancai’s documentary “A Different Kind of Chinese in the South Seas”, produced in 2015, takes viewers through the transmission of the Tua Pek Kong faith in Indonesia by visiting the eighth and ninth generations of the Hakka people who have laid down their roots in the region and by combining oral histories and on-site filming of various ancient Chinese temples and guild halls.

Every year, starting on the eve of the Lunar New Year, the Chinese in Singkawang, with the support of the local government, organize a series of Chinese New Year celebrations. The Lantern Parade is a vital part of this celebration and is the highlight of the festival. It was originally a Chinese ritual of “welcoming the deities”, but later developed into a multi-ethnic cultural event as a “meeting of deities and people”. In the parade, the local Hakka community, other Chinese communities, and local Indonesians come together to worship and showcase the cultural attributes of different communities under the same ritual tradition.

The documentary “Tatung & Capgomeh”, directed by KeceKece, consists of a number of content clips from the Lantern Festival event, and through the virtual space built on the new media platform, it allows people who are in a different place to feel the cultural atmosphere of the ceremony site. The Lantern Festival parade begins at 4:30 a.m. on the 15th day of the first month of the lunar calendar, with an approximately 50-m-long golden loong glowing on the road among cheerful scenes. The dancing loong is made of bamboo with candles or oil lamps inside. At night, it circles around a pillar as a “fire loong” to pray for good weather and good harvests. The overseas Chinese live in a social environment with complex races, beliefs, and languages. In the parade activities where they interact with local communities, they use the “loong” as a symbol of Chinese culture based on the need to define their identities. The loong dance and many elements of the parade are wonderfully mixed together, becoming a cultural symbol across communities.

The Golden Loong Dance is performed for approximately 60 min, after which the monks of the temples begin to prepare for the parade. When ready, they gather at the parade site at the temple square. The float procession also departs from the Tua Pek Kong Temple, which is the most significant of the temples, among the sound of the police. The parade begins with the sound of a police officer. Young men dressed in gold and red carry a palanquin in the shape of a Chinese palace and walk through the street with a loud drum and gong. Finally, Tua Pek Kong was invited into the temple, surrounded by a crowd.

The cultural functions of Tua Pek Kong worship of the Hakka people in Southeast Asia

Folk beliefs are cultural symbols that are rooted in everyday life and have vital social and cultural functions. As Emile Durkheim (1999) argues, the specific function of religion is not to prompt people to think about problems or enrich their learning, but to inspire people to act and help them become stronger so that they can continue to live. “Folk beliefs are also cultural boundaries” (Cui 2006), and markers of cultural distinction among different ethnic groups. For the Southeast Asian Hakka people, the practice of the Tua Pek Kong ritual not only provides psychological comfort, but also achieves intra-community bonding via the acceptance of the spiritual symbols of Hakka culture. Moreover, in the performance and development of the ritual, the localization of the belief and the integration of different ethnic cultures are realized. “Tua Pek Kong” has become a shared cultural symbol for the Hakka Chinese community in Southeast Asia in the connection between individuals, communities, and groups.

The first connection: the abode where an individual’s mind is placed

One of the primary points of primitive religion is the sanctification of vital crises in human life. The greatest crisis of life, namely, the threat of death, can give rise to the religious act of sanctification (Malinowski 2002). However, people’s existing capabilities, both technical and rational, are not enough to fight against natural disasters and bad luck that bring the threat of death. Therefore, to survive, people have to create “supernatural” powers (Gao 2010). The essence of survival is a process of continuous experimentation supported by illusions and visions. Engels observed that all religions are merely the illusionary reflection in people’s minds of the external forces that govern daily life (Marx and Engels 1965). Notably, in the primitive period when productivity was low and it was difficult for human beings to overcome nature, religious rituals could provide people with the power to overcome adversity.

In earlier times, Hakka people left their hometowns to make a living in Southeast Asia. Faced with the unfamiliar environment and a life full of uncertainties, they always had a sense of uncertainty in their hearts, and religious beliefs with utilitarian overtones could bring some spiritual solace. The simple belief that “all requests will be answered” also fits the survival needs of overseas Hakka people. The hope of Hakka people for the blessing of Tua Pek Kong is concentrated in daily ritual practice. The repetitive ritual drill, have an allegory on the expectations of the worshipper, whose spiritual beliefs are accrued through one ritual after another. Such continuous and repetitive rituals visualize the abstract faith and bring forth the power of spiritual settlement to a new day that is entirely unknown. Nowadays, Hakka people from all over the world are also utilizing online platforms to share their faith stories and post their prayers in the comments section of social media platforms to engage in religious practices online.

The second connection: a bridge to community connection

According to the transformative view of religion, rituals can “establish a coherent sacred practice for a chaotic and disordered universe” (Ji 2016). The collective Tua Pek Kong ritual not only showcases the transmission of ritual sanctity but also transforms into a memorialization of the group’s shared emotions and the formation of an ethnic emotional community. The beliefs and rituals of Tua Pek Kong brought the Hakka together in the organizational structure of the Hakka people, and the social nature of religion was manifested in the establishment of religious organizations and institutions. When Hakka Huay Kuan were not yet commonly established, Tua Pek Kong temples conducted social organization functions by serving as public spaces for the Hakka communities, such as providing security for production, assigning guarantees, and effectively coordinating social relations among members by shaping their cognitive schemas and behavioural habits, thereby serving the function of maintaining community order (Dong and Zhang 2018).

Weber (2010) argued that similarities in physical appearances and customs, as well as the support of memories based on actual migration—opening up new lands, colonization, or individual migration—can induce beliefs in homophily. Therefore, so-called ethnic groups, namely, groups that have subjective beliefs about common descent due to similarities in physical appearances or customs, or because of memories of colonization and migration, are able to inspire a community of social action that believe in a common ethnic origin. In the pluralistic space created by Tua Pek Kong worship, the individual “Hakka identity” is constantly reinforced, thereby leading to a collective perception. Under socialized and institutionalized management, a Hakka society was gradually formed, and gathered and expanded against the background of belief identity. To this day, Hakka society still portrays Tua Pek Kong as the “collective ancestral deity of Hakka people” (Leng and Wang 2020).

In this mediatized society, social media has also become a new way of presenting religious beliefs, and people have begun to use social media to change others’ stereotypes of a particular religious belief to seek religious identity (Herbert and Hansen 2018). Lim and Sng (2020) explored how Chinese Christians have used social media to build up their online communities from a cross-contextual perspective, arguing that as a result of engaging in interactions with online platforms, the believers gradually developed an emotional attachment to their faith community and expanded their social networks. Documentaries, TV programs, and other visual texts about the Hakka Tua Pek Kong in Southeast Asia also appear on social media platforms, creating an alternative meeting place for the Hakka societies in Southeast Asia and facilitating the spread of the Tua Pek Kong faith.

The third connection: becoming a symbol of cultural integration

One’s cultural identity is heavily influenced by the place where one’s memories were formed, for example, historically, Singapore-born Chinese did have different cultural identities from first-generation immigrants from China (Ng 2021). The construction of Chinese community identity entails not only mere cognition but also the shaping of a way of life. This identity works through the connection between individuals and the environment in which they live and is inseparable from individuals’ cultural experiences (Jiang 2019). The Hakka people’s Tua Pek Kong beliefs are inherently intertwined with Chinese culture and have thus been embraced by other Chinese dialect groups, further realizing the integration of the Chinese community. Under the changing social environment, Tua Pek Kong has been gradually integrated into the Southeast Asian cultural space through Chinese immigrants’ practice of worship and has completed the process of localization. This has led to the development of Tua Pek Kong from a geopolitical faith to a “pan-Hakka” faith that transcends spatial and ethnic boundaries (Zhou 2005), exhibiting the coexistence of homogeneous and heterogeneous characteristics with regard to culture.

The formation of a state of “unity in diversity” among humans depends on the conceptual search for the essence and meaning of the supreme good (Bai 2012), with the aim of “awakening the consciousness of all people to live together in the space left to us by history” (Lévi-Strauss 2006). The reason for the persistence of the Tua Pek Kong faith in Southeast Asia is that it has been able to adapt to the aspirations of different ethnic groups. The development of the Tua Pek Kong faith in Southeast Asia is also closely related to the evolution of its social status. Conflicts of interest and competition for resources…… Due to various historical origins, boundaries have always existed between the Hakka community and other Chinese communities, as well as the local communities in Southeast Asia; however, common beliefs are the pathway to crossing ethnic boundaries.

Bozdağ (2014) argued that after the first laborers immigrated to Germany in the 1960s, Germany’s attitude toward immigrants gradually shifted from viewing them as foreigners and aliens to its own citizens. This shift in thinking was also reflected in the media, which often featured content reflecting ethnic and cultural diversity. Similarly, in Southeast Asia, under the influence of cultural diversity in social media and after a long period of cultural exchange and adaptation, the belief in Tua Pek Kong has become a symbol of the cultural intermingling of different ethnic groups in Southeast Asia.

Conclusion

As an important symbol of faith in Southeast Asian Hakka images, Tua Pek Kong has always been embedded in the daily life of society. The video narratives of Tua Pek Kong faith are both diachronic and ephemeral, not only focusing on the “ongoing religious activities” but also recording the “changing culture of faith”.

Because it was nurtured and developed in a special extraterritorial environment, the Tua Pek Kong worship of the Hakka people in Southeast Asia looks slightly different from the worship in their native land. Daily life is the abode of Tua Pek Kong worship, and rituals are the most basic way for the Hakka people to practice their faith. Tua Pek Kong worship has been extended and solidified through repetitive physical practice. With the passage of time, Tua Pek Kong worship has gradually integrated into Southeast Asian Chinese society and has resonated with the local culture. In the process of localization, Tua Pek Kong’s beliefs have also crossed racial boundaries, moving from geo-culture and God-culture to the shared culture of all ethnic groups and constructing a common cultural space through the continuous performance of rituals. Such cultural malleability is also, as Murphy says, “for every social system, the need for flexibility—the ability to adapt itself in response to environmental change—is just as crucial as the need for stability” (Murphy 1991).

As soon as the camera appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, people realized its important role in recording, preserving, and disseminating human culture, and images became “part of the toolbox” of anthropologists. Some anthropologists have used images to record the customs, rituals, and social life of different regions and ethnic groups to show their research subjects in a more realistic and vivid way. Entering the new media era, scholars of anthropology and folklore have turned their attention to the virtual online field, whereas researchers in the field of religion have also noticed the important impact of the media on religious communication.

From the perspective of the intersection of religion, anthropology, and media studies, new media have promoted the movement of religious culture from “far away” to “in front of us” and have expanded the scope of religious communities while documenting the “changing religious culture”. In addition to documenting the changing religious culture, it expands the activity space of religious groups and constructs various religious and cultural communities.