Taipei
I: Taipei
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III: Puli, Guanziling, and Kaohsiung
(I) Taipei.
Since one member of our group was not very ambulatory and occasionally required a wheelchair, we looked for a travel agency, who could supply us with a van and guide for our stay on the island. We chose Topology Travel, after reading the posts in Tripadvisor, and we were in general quite happy we had made that choice. The driver and guide were very kind, personable, and helpful and the van was large enough.
But from the practical point of view, they were actually just a bunch of well-intentioned amateurs. The driver had apparently never been to the places we were going to and relied on his GPS to take us there. Well, the GPS always takes us on the shortest route, be it a small alley, an almost impassable road, or even a dead-end road. So we lost a lot of time getting to our destination.
The guide volunteered very little background information on the island, but was otherwise most helpful if we wanted to see or buy something. But she did check and double-check that all our hotel reservations were there and confirmed. The van was big enough, but poorly configured. We could have changed the seat configuration, but nobody knew how to do that, so all the time during the trip it was rather awkward for some of us. In addition, the driver and the guide showed poor time management skills and we would come at an attraction, just as it closed down or it was too dark already to see.
(a) Bao-An Temple.
Taiwan has reportedly more than 15,000 places of worship. Most of them are Taoist and Buddhist temples. Christian churches and Muslim mosques are there also, but in much lower numbers. Surprisingly, these temples are usually well attended, with visitors of all ages coming to pray or to genuflect in front of their favorite deity.
right: The main building of the Bao-An Temple in Taipei.
It is located in the Dalongdong district, and is classified as a Class II National Heritage Site.
According to legend, some early settlers in this region returned to their Tong-An county in the Motherland in the 18th century, where they asked for some spiritual incense from the Bai-jiao Tzu-ji temple to take back to Taiwan. This incense was then enshrined in a temple, named “bao-an”, meaning “protecting the people from the Tong-An region”. At that time the temple was just a shabby wooden structure, but over time the temple was enlarged, rebuilt and improved, and finally completed in 1830. But then neglect came in and the temple had to be again completely repaired and renovated. Work was started in 1995. In 2003, the temple was inducted in the UNESCO Asia-Pacific Heritage. It is now a very beautiful structure with lots of decorative dragons and other curlicues on the ridges of their roofs, with rooflines like the prows of a ship. This baroque style is typical of a Taoist temple.
In the Far East, the three most important “religions” are based on Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. They coexist peacefully with each other and there are even temples, where the three faiths are observed on alternate days in the same temple, with figures of the three deities next to each other in the main worship chamber.
The typical Taoist temple is baroque, as we see here; the Buddhist temples, on the other hand, are more reserved in their decorations and contain many paintings and sculptures of Buddha and the bodhisattvas, persons who have attained Enlightenment, but who have postponed going to Nirvana to help others to attain Enlightenment. The temples dedicated to Confucius are the most sober in style, with little decorations. Sculptures and paintings of deities or saints are usually absent.
Emphasis on the role of the Bao-An temple has changed over the years. Whereas the sanctuary was originally designed to house the spiritual incense to protect the members of a clan, there is now a presiding God of Health in the temple as well as other gods in auxiliary chapels around the perimeter of the main temple building. You will see many supplicants coming to ask the gods for help in matters pertaining to health. Of course you can also ask for other favors.
left: To the right and left of the main temple are long corridors with smaller auxiliary temples dedicated to other minor deities. Here is a man praying to the particular deity in the chamber in front of him.
The correct way to supplicate is to light several incense sticks to pray to the deity of your choice and ask his intercession for healing a sickness of yourself or of a beloved one. You then pick up a pair of small flat wooden slabs, marked differently on each side, and conveniently placed nearby. You shake them and throw them on the ground. If they come up with the same markings up, the god is not inclined to talk to you today. If the markings are opposite, then you can proceed to the next step, which is to take a stick at random from a round quiver-like box.
Look for a number inscribed on the stick. Go to the temple office, where you can find a wall with numbered shelves. Find the shelf with your number, and pick up a copy of a printed piece of paper, on which is written, often in rather ambiguous terms, the answer of the deity to your request. If you like the answer, please donate something to the temple; if you don’t, you can always try again some other day.
right: The principal shrine of the temple, showing the effigy of Baosheng Dadi in the center.
The presiding deity of Bao-an temple is now Baosheng Dadi, also called Emperor. He was originally just a human being like you or me. His surname was Wu and his given name was Tao. He was also born in Tong-an county, on the 15th day of the lunar month in year 4 of the Taiping Hsing-guo period, during the Sung dynasty. This translates to around 797 AD. Even as a child, he was extremely bright and he studied medicine extensively. At 24, he passed the provincial examinations, which elevated his position immensely. He then served as a controlling inspector.
In later life he resigned from his Government post and become a spiritual leader as well as an extraordinary physician. He preached and he healed the sick and he is credited with saving countless lives with his pills. When he died, he was 58 years of age. But even after he left this mortal world, his healing powers continued and many people were cured by praying and asking for his help.
A temple was founded in Bai-jiao and Dadi was enshrined and given the title of Great Tao Immortal. Many years later, during the Ming dynasty, the Empress Wen was suffering from a breast ailment, which her doctors could not cure. She prayed to Dadi for help and he came back from the Afterworld to appear before her in the form of a Taoist priest. He felt her pulse through a red silk string (he was not supposed to touch her, since she was an empress), diagnosed her problem and cured her. Emperor Cheng-zu, the husband of the cured Empress Wen, wanted to give him gold and other treasures, but Dadi declined and it was said that he then rode away on a crane. That is when the emperor was convinced that it was indeed Dadi, who had come from the Great Beyond to save his wife. So the Emperor, in his gratitude, conferred on Dadi many titles, imperial robes in temples dedicated to him, and the title of God of Medicine. Which he now still has in this Bao-an temple.
You will find the same progression in the Catholic world. A person heals, preaches, and does saintly work, and when he dies he performs miracles, healing the intractable sick, who ask for his help. The church makes him a saint, puts his effigy somewhere in a church and you can pray and ask this saint for help for whatever you want. Instead of incense sticks you light a candle. The idea is the same.
The main temple is a rectangle with the entrance to the shrine of Baosheng Dadi immediately in front of you. Around this building are the galleries with offices and auxiliary chapels in a separate building. In front of the main temple are four dragon pillars..
left: The picture shows the two inner pillars carved with two dragons each and date from 1918. On the picture of the main temple, you can see the outer columns; they were first carved in 1804. The kneeling lady is praying to Baosheng Dadi
When entering Bao-An temple from the front, there are two gates. The one on the right is adorned with sculptures and drawings of a dragon; the one on the left is decorated with the images of a tiger. You have to enter through the Dragon Gate and exit through the Tiger Gate, unless you are a uneducated foreigner and you don’t know any better. And after you enter this gate, you will see the main temple in front of you.
And as you stand on the open square in front of the main temple building, to the left is a building with a gong; to the right is a building with a bell. The bell is sounded in the morning; the gong is used in the evening to indicate opening and closing of the temple.
In the temple you will also find many effigies and drawings of Guan Yu, the red-faced bearded god, who was one of the three protagonist “brothers” in “The Romance of the Three Kingdoms”, the sonorous Chinese classical historical novel equivalent to Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad. He was said to be extremely strong and when he was finally killed in battle, the heavens wept.
right: Three times a year, the temple donate food baskets and other necessities to the indigenous population
When we were there, we observed a heart-warming ceremony. From collected funds, the temple distributes packages of food and staples to indigenous residents of Taipei. This happens three times a year and we were there during one of those days. The poor come here, go to a table, where their citizen card is checked, and they gratefully pick up their package.
(b) Taipei Confucius Temple.
The great Sage, Confucius, was born in 551 BC and died at the ripe old age of 72. In 497 BC, when he was already 55 years old, he left his position as the highest-ranking official of the State of Lu, and started a sojourn to the surrounding nation-states to espouse his ideas on ideal behavior, morals, and ethics. The core value of his teachings revolve around benevolence, love, rites, music, trust, righteousness, filial piety, loyalty, tolerance, respect and reverence. This journey lasted 14 years, but he was not too successful when he presented his teachings and beliefs to the ruling monarchs. His greatest achievement was as an educator. At that time education was the special privilege of the nobility. His position was that everybody, regardless of background, should have access to education.
Confucianism, enriched by his disciples in the succeeding generations, was elevated to a quasi-sate religion during the reign of Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty. The great Sage has been honored by rulers as well as the people of China ever since.
left: Outside the main gate of the entrance building. After you go through this building, you will get to a square where the main temple is located.
This temple, just around the corner of the Bao-an temple, was modeled after the Confucius Temple in Qufu and shows the influence of the architecture of southern Fujianese. Building started in 1879, during the Qing dynasty, when Taipei was the prefectural capital of Taiwan. But this temple was demolished during the Japanese occupation of Taiwan. Between 1895 and 1945, Taiwan was a dependency of the Japanese Empire. Rebuilding of the temple started in 1930 and completed in 1939.
On the side and in the back of the main building are long corridors with auxiliary shrines and temple offices. To the left, outside the inner walls of the structure, there is now an auditorium where 3D movies of ceremonies at the Confucius Temple are shown. This is a new adjunct of the complex to allow visitors gain a better understanding of the temple.
right: the corridor on the right of the main temple on the right in the picture. Most of the rooms appear to be just used as offices. The structure is austere, as befitting a temple of Confucius.
(c) National Palace Museum.
The National Palace Museum was originally established as the Palace Museum in Beijing's Forbidden City in 1925, shortly after the expulsion of Puyi, the last emperor of China, from the Forbidden City by warlord Feng Yü-hsiang. The items in the museum consisted of the valuables of the former Imperial family.
In 1931, the Nationalist Government of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek ordered the museum to make preparations to evacuate its most valuable pieces out of the city to prevent them from falling into the hands of the Imperial Japanese Army. As the Japanese Army advanced farther inland during the Second Sino-Japanese War, the collection was moved westward via three routes to several places including Anshun and Leshan until the surrender of Japan in 1945. But then the Chinese Civil War resumed, following the surrender of the Japanese. In the civil war that followed Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's decided to evacuate his army as well as a big portion of the collected art to Taiwan.
The result is now that the National Palace Museum has probably the best collection of Chinese ancient art in the world. They have some 700,000 pieces of ancient artifacts and works of art. The Peoples Republic of China (PRC) has long claimed the collection was stolen from and legitimately belong in China. But rhetoric has calmed down over the years. Although this museum has frequently organized traveling exhibits of some of their treasures to foreign countries, and foreign museums have exhibited their pieces in Taipei, Taipei will not exhibit their pieces in China.
In God we trust, everybody else is suspect.
Because of the size of the collection, not more than about 1 % of the collection is exhibited at a given time. What to us was amazing was the large collection of artifacts from the Xiang dynasty, 9th - 11th century BC. These are items some 3,000 years old, and yet already masterfully crafted.
left: One of the most impressive pieces in the museum is the “Jadeite cabbage”. It is a piece of jadeite carved into the shape of a cabbage head, with a large and a small grasshopper camouflaged in the leaves. The ruffled semi-translucent leaves attached is due to the masterful combination of various natural color of the jade to recreate the color variations of a real cabbage.
The "Meat-shaped Stone" is often exhibited together with the Jadeite Cabbage. This is a piece of jasper, which is a form of agate. The different strata in the stone is cleverly used to create a likeness of a piece of pork cooked in soy sauce. The dyed and textured surface makes the layers of skin, lean meat, and fat incredibly lifelike.
right: The meat-shaped stone.
We spent three hours in the Museum, enjoying the incredibly interesting displays. But be prepared to fight your way through hordes of visitors, most of them Chinese at all times of the day. But guards posted at strategic points keep traffic moving and orderly. The items on display have explanations in Chinese, obviously, but most of them also have an English subtitle, so you can at least understand what it is all about.
And this below is funny.
The Chinese are, well-deservedly, very proud of this immensely valuable collection. That is why the Museum is always so full of Chinese visitors wanting to see all these treasures first-hand. Some of these visitors are apparently not used to going to museums and other nice places as can be inferred from the picture on the left. The sign is in Chinese only, so a foreigner will not understand what the message is:
left: “Please do not take the toilet paper, so other visitors can use it.”
d: Outside Taipei.
(1) Yilan National Center for Traditional Arts
One day we drove to Yilan to visit the National Center for Traditional Arts. The area is a large agricultural area with relative small farms. There are the farm houses everywhere with a large ponds not more than an acre each, some of them dry, and some of them with a little bit of water. It is apparently after harvesting season. There is not much to see in the whole area except the Center.
right: The food center has a restaurant upstairs and a lot of little shops downstairs serving different kind of foods around a large area for seating. This is one of those shops.
right: There are little shops and demonstration workplaces of yesteryear. This one is a calligraphy shop from an age gone by, when writing was an art and the computer keyboard had not been developed.
left: Pulling candy is hard work to make hard string candy. Kids love this show, also because they get to eat some of the sweets.
In a big, covered, but open shed, the entertainment was a sexy belly-dancing lady. Even the young kids were enthralled watching her shaking her stuff. Kids may look young, but they mature fast.
right: A belly dancer entertaining the crowd. Look how many kids there were enthralled by the show
At a different location in the Center, there is also a theater with a “cultural” show, which was a blend of singing, dancing, some magic, all based loosely on the story of Robin Hood.
Very amateurish, but the staff was everywhere in the audience to uphold the ban on photography. Just as well, I suppose.
(2) Kavalan Whisky distillery
Our next stop was the Kavalan Whiskey distillery.
Because of poor planning and atrocious time management of the guides, we came too late to participate in the sampling of their whiskeys, which apparently was very good and also, as we noted, quite pricey. The company seems to know what they are doing and they have won awards for their whiskies, even though it seems they only had been in business for a few years. Their forte is the single malt whisky.
They also have a very nice, self-guided tour, showing some of their operations, as well as informative posters about the whiskey production process.
left: Poster with the prizes they won in 2013.
right: Bank of distillation columns.
(3) Baija Fish Farms.
From there we went to look at the Bajia Fish farm and again, because of poor planning of the guides, we only came there after dark and we couldn’t see very much of the operations. Not that it quite mattered, because it was quite simple. Water is piped in from the mountains and entered heavily aerated ponds. In each of the pounds, each maybe 30’ in diameter, was an island where the aeration machines were installed and where the fish food was stored in huge barrels. The waste water exited these ponds and enters a large lagoon, and from there the water was treated as waste water.
left: Lighted neon sign of fish restaurant.
We stopped to have dinner at the adjacent fish restaurant, called the Leisure Fishfarm. We stopped there for a fish dinner and the main dish was a 2-3 lbs steamed fish in a delicate soy sauce. We also ordered the other specialty of the restaurant, one huge but very tasty barbecue’d pig’s foot.
(4) Yangmingshan National Park.
On another day we drove to the Yangmingshan National Park, which was a waste of time, because it was very misty and it was very windy and it was drizzling to boot. Very little can be seen under these conditions. We did stop at the “Small Oil Pit” and in the driving rain we walked to look at some small volcanic fumaroles and sulfurous gases escaping from the vents. The weather was not pleasant and so we went back to Taipei soon afterwards.
right: Small fumarole with boiling water and sulfurous smells
left: Wind, rain, mist in Yangmingshan National Park. Uggh, wet and dreary.
4:07 PM
