« Costas Refuses to Host Show on Holloway | Main | Shoes »
August 20, 2005
Goddess called in to scare off tsunami ghosts
BANGKOK (Reuters)With Asian tourists still shunning its southern beaches, Thailand is calling in a revered Chinese sea goddess to ward off the restive spirits of the thousands who died in last December's tsunami.
A statue of Godmother Ruby, known as Mazu in Chinese, will be brought to the Thai island of Phuket from the Chinese coastal province of Fujian next month for ghost-clearing rites, said Suwalai Pinpradab of the Tourism Authority of Thailand.
"After the tsunami, Taiwanese, Hong Kong, Chinese and other East Asians dare not come because they don't want to visit places where mass deaths took place," Suwalai told Reuters on Friday. "It is inauspicious."
Mazu, a Taoist goddess of the sea, has a huge following among fishermen and shipworkers in coastal provinces of southern China and Taiwan.
Read more here.
Posted by Daffodil at August 20, 2005 6:01 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.daffodillane.com/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/3362