Yiu Ming Temple: Sydney Travel Guide

Retreat Street is a short, plain residential street in Alexandria, which makes the temple easy to miss. Most streets around here are brick terraces and converted warehouses. Then you reach a building with the curved roofline, red and gold, and characters over the door of a southern Chinese temple. It has stood in this part of inner Sydney for more than a century.

A temple built by one district’s emigrants

The name is a place. Yiu Ming refers to a district in Guangdong province in southern China, and the temple was built in the early twentieth century by the society representing migrants from that area. It was part community hall, part spiritual home for men who had come to New South Wales to work.

That origin explains its scale. This is not a grand civic temple. It was built by and for one group of families, and it is still run by their descendants as a living place of worship. Its heritage value is recognised in New South Wales, and it is one of the oldest surviving Chinese temples in Sydney.

It belongs alongside the Sze Yup Temple in Glebe as one of the city’s two old joss houses. If you have time, visit both. Together they tell the story of Cantonese migration to Sydney better than any museum display.

What you find inside

The doorway leads you from Australian suburban brick into a room built around altars. Expect the standard elements of a Cantonese temple, all of them in use rather than on display:

• Altars with statues of deities, set back from the entrance
• Incense burners, often with sticks already smouldering in the sand
• Red and gold hangings and carved woodwork
• Offerings of fruit or flowers placed by worshippers
• Calligraphy panels and boards naming donors or ancestors

It is a small space. You can take it in within a few minutes. What makes it worth the trip is slowing down and reading the details: the wear on the floor, the layered smoke stains, how a building far from China has kept its customs going since the early 1900s.

Getting to Retreat Street

There is no train station at the door. Redfern Station is the nearest big rail hub, and from there the walk south into Alexandria takes roughly 15 to 20 minutes through Redfern and Waterloo. Several buses run along Botany Road nearby, and that cuts the walk a lot.

Check your route on a map app before you set off, because the side streets here twist and Retreat Street is short. Street parking in Alexandria is mostly residential and often time-limited, so read the signs before you leave a car. Public transport is the easier choice.

Timing your visit inside 9:30 to 4

The temple keeps the same hours every day of the week: 9:30am to 4pm, Monday to Sunday. There is no late opening, so a visit has to fit into the daytime. If you arrive after 3:30pm, you may feel rushed.

Most visitors need 30 to 45 minutes. That leaves enough time to look closely, read any signage and sit for a moment. Since the closing time is early, a morning visit gives you the rest of the day free. You could pair it with lunch in Redfern or a walk to the Sze Yup Temple later on.

Expect more worshippers and activity around Chinese New Year and other festival days in the lunar calendar. If you want to watch ritual practice, come then. If you want quiet, choose an ordinary weekday.

Behaving well in a working temple

Treat this as somebody’s place of worship, not a sightseeing stop. The temple gets fewer visitors than Sydney’s well-known sights, so you may be one of only a handful of people there. Your behaviour will be noticed. A few habits help:

• Step over the threshold rather than on it, as is customary in Chinese temples.
• Ask before photographing altars or people praying. If someone is at prayer, put the camera away.
• Keep your voice low. It is a small room and sound carries.
• Don’t touch the statues or the offerings, and never take food or fruit from an altar.
• Leave a donation if you can. Temples like this rely on gifts from the community, and there is usually a box near the entrance.

If you want to burn incense, watch how worshippers do it, or ask whoever is looking after the temple. Usually this means bowing with the sticks held in both hands before placing them in the burner. Nobody expects visitors to take part, but it is a respectful gesture if you are shown the way.

Shoulders covered and modest clothing is the safe choice, as in any temple. Avoid pointing your feet or a finger at the altars.

An Alexandria detour worth the walk

Part of the appeal is how ordinary everything around the temple is. Alexandria and neighbouring Waterloo were once industrial land with factories, workshops and, earlier, market gardens. The temple dates from the period when Chinese communities were part of that working landscape.

Those suburbs have now become a patchwork of warehouse conversions, cafés and new apartment blocks. Walking from Redfern to Retreat Street, you pass through several layers of that change. The temple has stayed while everything else changed around it. You only notice that on foot.

Who will get the most out of it

This is a short, focused stop rather than a half-day outing. It suits travellers interested in the Chinese-Australian past, architecture or religious practice. It also suits anyone who has already seen the Chinese Garden of Friendship in Darling Harbour and wants something smaller and less polished.

If you expect a large complex with gift shops and guided tours, you will be disappointed. Come instead for a modest building that is still in use and a quiet morning in a part of Sydney most visitors never reach.