More than 100k eggs offered to 'Datuk Tua'

BUTTERWORTH: More than a hundred thousand eggs were offered to the Datuk Tua deity in celebration of his birthday on Tuesday evening.
Datuk Kong Teng Sin Hooi Temple chairman Sun Hock Khee said a total of 100,908 red-dyed eggs were offered during the ceremony.
He said devotees and volunteers took six hours to boil and dye the eggs which were donated by the public.
He said the public were very generous with their donations with some even donating 20,000 eggs in one go.
"We had to cook the eggs in batches, each batch consist of 3,150 eggs and we had to use nine gas boilers to cook them," he told theSun.
The eggs were then arranged into the shapes of five pagodas and offered to the deity at the stroke of midnight.
After prayers, the eggs will be packed and distributed to devotees for them to take home as tokens of blessings.
Sun said the egg offerings began in 1983 when the temple committee divined that Datuk Tua wanted red-coloured eggs for his birthday.
"Devotees would ask Datuk Tua for good health and prosperity," he added.
theSun was told Datuk Tua was a local person who stayed in Butterworth before the place was developed some 150 years years ago.
After his death, he was cannonised as a deity and as a guardian spirit of the area when locals turned the placed he stayed into a temple which also houses eight other deities.
Devotees would come to pray to Datuk Tua when their livestock went missing and would miraculously find their missing animals the next day.