It’s well known that China’s got fake Louis Vuitton bags aplenty, fake American cigarettes for gullible smokers, and lots of fake Nike tennis shoes, too. But fake monks in fake temples? According to Chinese officials—yes, it has those as well.
“There have been some non-religious sites employing fake monks who tricked tourists into donating money or buying expensive incense,” warned Liu Wei, an official from the State Administration of Religious Affairs, reported the official Xinhua News Agency today.
To put the dodgy abbots and impostor monasteries out of action, Chinese authorities plan to start issuing certificates of authenticity to all of China’s 33,000 Buddhist temples and more than 9,000 Taoist temples. The temples will be required to display them “to help believers tell real temples from fake ones,” the Xinhua report said.
Monks are already issued identity cards but don’t often display them prominently, and visitors seldom ask to see them. “It is usually considered inappropriate and disrespectful to ask them to show their certificates,” said Xu Kang, a deputy director at the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Ethnic and Religious Affairs, in an interview with the Global Times newspaper published last year.
Fake monks are hardly new to China (nor to the rest of the world; they are also common in Sydney and Hong Kong, and have even started showing up in New York’s Times Square). Early last year two temples on the famous sacred Buddhist mountain of Wutaishan were shut down and six people were arrested for masquerading as monks, to swindle money out of pious tourists.
“Fake monks are not a novelty in China, especially in rural areas where those impersonating monks in order to cheat money often go unchecked,” Xinhua said. Religious authorities will “promote the ‘anti-fake’ label nationwide, giving people the ability to check whether a temple is a legal religious site.”
