Manual of the Amoy Colloquial

[Mark Yong]

SimL wrote:
p592 tiam2-tsu2 “to consecrate the tablet by dotting it at several places with a red mixture, just after the coffin is laid in the grave but before it is covered up; before this is done, the relatives call the spirit to leave the coffin and come to the tablet; if possible a graduate or mandarin is hired to dot the tablet.”

I think I read about this in Lee Siow Mong's "Spectrum of Chinese Culture". Prior to the tablet's consecration, there is a character 王 on it, supposedly indicating that the deceased is like a 'king' (for the day). Upon consecration, a dot is added to the top of the character 王, thus changing it to 主, and 'elevating' the deceased's status to that of a 'lord'. The Chinese characters for this would therefore be 點主.

[SimL]

Ah, we still haven't found an affordable copy of the 1899 version with handwritten Chinese characters in the first section (Douglas, not Barclay's Supplement).

Hi Andrew,

Indeed, we haven't. I think you and I must have seen this somewhere on Google or some other second-hand booklist: an edition of Douglas, where the equivalent hanzi is written in a beautiful hand next to each headword. It costs something astronomical, like US$1,200 or something (from memory).

a dot is added to the top of the character 王, thus changing it to 主

Hi Mark,

Thanks very much for sharing this. It completely explains the phrase, and gives me a vivid image I can associate with it.