Column Couplets in Thai - Chinese Temple A Case Study of Tsi Shan Temple in the HatYai District Songkhla Province กลอนคู่รูปแบบอิ๋งเหลียนในวัดคณะสงฆ์จีนนิกาย กรณีศึกษาวัดฉื่อฉาง อำเภอหาดใหญ่ จังหวัดสงขลา

Abstract

Column couplets are couplets written in Chinese and carved on the column. Column couplets are special type of Chinese verse. The skill of writing Chinese couplets is keeping symmetry, two sentences of couplets must have the same number of characters, and the first sentence is on the right side,               the second sentence is on the left side. Column couplets can be found in most of the Thai - Chinese temples in Thailand. This study had investigated Tsi Shan Temple and collected all the column couplets of the temple. Author had translated couplets from Chinese to Thai, studied the structure and assessed the historical value of column couplets, the result shows that Tsi Shan Temple has a long history but    the history about the temple abbot who is also the column couplets writer may not have been recorded in the history of the temple. And as the reason of the decline of the author's Chinese proficiency, column couplets of the temple have changed in meaning, structure and historical value with times changing. And with the theory of cross-cultural communication and the theory of Herbert Marshall McLuhan,  the medium is the message. Culture always must adapt itself to the development of society. There for, couplets in Tsi Shan temple made a change from the cool medium to the hot medium.