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The World's First Taoist Channel

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The World's First Taoist Channel

When Fung Ying Seen Koon put its own television channel on the air in December 2004, the Hong Kong temple was doing something no Taoist institution anywhere had attempted before: broadcasting a full twenty four hours a day of dedicated Taoist programming. The temple itself traces back to 1929, founded by five Taoist masters in the Quanzhen Longmen lineage on a hillside site in Fanling, in Hong Kong's New Territories, and had spent decades building the kind of charitable and educational infrastructure, schools, clinics, elder care, that turned it from a small retreat for scriptural study into one of Hong Kong's most substantial religious institutions. Broadcasting was simply the newest form that mission took.

The channel launched on Hong Kong Broadband Television's bbTV service, at channel 718, carrying Cantonese language programming built around the same purpose the temple's other work already served: presenting Chinese culture and Taoist thought to two different audiences at once, newcomers who might not otherwise encounter Taoism, and existing practitioners looking to deepen their understanding. Lectures, documentaries on Taoist history and figures, and tours of temple culture filled the schedule, produced not by outside broadcasters but by the temple's own Taoist Culture Center, keeping editorial control inside the institution whose name the channel carried.

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