中文Englishไทย
9min readBykaucim.ai Editorial
On this page8
  1. 01What you actually see in a temple
  2. 02What is on the stick — and what is not
  3. 03Where the 100 sticks come from
  4. 04What the practice is for
  5. 05Why anyone uses them
  6. 06Online versus the temple
  7. 07A short answer
  8. 08Related articles

What Are Kau Chim Sticks? A Plain-English Walk-Through

Kau chim sticks are flat bamboo splints, numbered, kept in a cylindrical canister at certain Chinese temples. The classic set has 100 of them, each labeled with a Chinese number from 1 to 100. You shake the canister at an angle until one stick falls out, read the number, and look up the corresponding poem in the temple's reference book.

That is the entire physical mechanic. Everything else around the practice is interpretation.

What you actually see in a temple

If you walk into Sik Sik Yuen Wong Tai Sin Temple in Hong Kong, you will see worshippers kneeling in the main hall holding cylindrical containers shaped like a tall narrow vase. Inside each container: roughly 100 thin bamboo sticks, each about the length of a chopstick, each labeled with a number written in classical Chinese characters.

The person kneeling will:

Nothing about the procedure looks dramatic. It looks like consulting a reference. That is closer to what is happening than most Western associations of *fortune telling* would suggest.

What is on the stick — and what is not

The stick itself is simple. A bamboo splint with a number. No symbols, no markings beyond that.

What is *attached* to that number — in the temple's reference text, not on the stick — is more involved. Each stick number maps to:

So when someone tells you they drew *第三十七* (number 37), the stick is the lookup key, and the actual content is in those four layers of attached text.

Where the 100 sticks come from

The Wong Tai Sin set of 100 sticks dates roughly to the late Qing Dynasty, with the verses themselves drawing on classical Chinese poetry traditions much older than that. The temple at Sik Sik Yuen formalized the current set in the early 20th century.

Different Chinese temples have their own stick sets. Che Kung Temple in Sha Tin uses its own 100. Tian Hou temples in Taiwan use yet another corpus. The 100-stick number is conventional, not universal — some temple traditions use 60 or 64. But if someone says *kau chim sticks* without specifying a temple, they usually mean the Wong Tai Sin set.

What the practice is for

Kau chim sticks are used to ask one specific question and receive one specific text in response. Common kinds of questions:

The practice is not particularly good at:

Why anyone uses them

A few reasons that come up across users:

Cultural continuity. For Cantonese-speaking communities, kau chim is part of growing up — grandmothers, festival visits, lunar new year. Drawing a stick can be as much about continuity with that lineage as about the answer.

Structured reflection. The practice forces you to ask a clean question, sit with whatever poem comes back, and decide what to do. People who find traditional decision-making frameworks too dry sometimes find the kau chim structure more usable.

The classical poetry itself. The verses are good. They are short, dense with classical reference, and have survived as readable text for a reason. Even setting aside the divinatory framing, reading the 100 verses slowly is a worthwhile literary exercise.

Different users emphasize different reasons. The practice does not require any one of them.

Online versus the temple

Most of the experience translates online. Drawing a number, reading the poem, considering the grade and topic — these all work in a browser. What does not translate: the temple environment, the embodied ritual, and access to a 解籤 interpreter who can talk through the stick with you.

For small questions, the online version works. For larger ones, the temple visit is still warranted if it is reachable.

Draw a kau chim stick online → — anonymous, six topics, the same 100-stick corpus the temple uses.

A short answer

Kau chim sticks are 100 numbered bamboo splints in a temple canister. Each number maps to a four-line classical Chinese poem, a grade, a story, and topic-specific commentary. You ask a question, draw one stick, and read the corresponding text. The practice has been in continuous use for centuries because the structure is simple and the verses are good.

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Frequently asked questions

How many kau chim sticks are there?

Wong Tai Sin Temple uses 100 numbered sticks. Other Chinese temples use their own sets — some 100, some 60, some 64 — with different verses attached. The 100-stick number is conventional, not universal.

What is written on a kau chim stick?

Just a number, in classical Chinese characters. The verse, grade, classical story, and topic-specific reading are not on the stick itself — they are in the temple's reference text, looked up by the stick's number.

Where do kau chim sticks come from historically?

The Wong Tai Sin 100-stick set was formalized in its current form in the early 20th century, with verses drawing on much older classical Chinese poetry. The broader 求籤 (requesting a slip) practice using bamboo lots in temples goes back at least 800 years and possibly to the Jin Dynasty (266-420 CE).

Are kau chim sticks the same as Chinese fortune cookies?

No. Fortune cookies — including the printed-slip versions sometimes called *fortune sticks* in restaurants — are a 20th-century American or Japanese-American invention. Kau chim is centuries-old Chinese temple practice with a fixed corpus and traditional interpretation. The two should not be confused.

Can I make my own kau chim sticks?

You can shake any 100 numbered objects to get a random number, and the lookup will work the same way. What you cannot replicate without temple access is the embodied ritual and the interpreter conversation. For solo home or online practice, a digital tool is functionally equivalent to a homemade physical set.

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kaucim.ai studies the 100 Wong Tai Sin fortune sticks of Hong Kong's Sik Sik Yuen temple. We work from the original temple text and the classical Chinese stories each stick references. Articles are for cultural understanding and self-reflection — not medical, legal, or financial advice.