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Bodies and Structures 2.0: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History

Pre-Colonial Sacred Spaces

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Contents of this annotation:
1. Pre-Colonial Sacred Spaces
Contents of this annotation:
1. Pre-Colonial Sacred Spaces
Contents of this annotation:
1. Pre-Colonial Sacred Spaces

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Jilong's Pre-colonial Sacred Geography
“In regards to the leadership of the people’s hearts,” said an article in the Taiwan nichinichi shinpō from November, 1896, “this is something that must have originated with the long-established system of temples. Now that Taiwan has become a part of Japan, we must of course maintain this system.” For the small town of Jilong, with a population of at most around 9,000 in 1895, that system contained a number of small institutions representing cults to local and imperial deities and quasi-Buddhist sects, many of which bordered on the heterodox. Three temples filled the core of this "long-established system," the Qing'an gong, Dianji gong, and Chenghuang miao, all of which sat within a few blocks of each other in the heart of the area settled by Chinese from Zhangzhou and Quanzhou counties in Fujian Province. Although these temples themselves were not all that "long-established," they nonetheless constituted the most significant pieces of sacred terrain when the Treaty of Shimonseki transferred Taiwan from Qing to Japanese imperial sovereignty. Once the Taiwan Government-General reached the conclusion expressed in the news article above and allowed temples to reopen, these three institutions, plus a few others, played increasingly important roles as leaders of the people's hearts.

As readers move through this pathway, they should be attentive to the roles of the islander/Taiwanese elites who established the temples, the deities that they enshrined within them, and also the overlapping scales of temple, city, island, and region that characterized both physical and imaginative geography. Also consider which perspectives operate, and dominate, on each page: The state or the everyday? The god's-eye or the person's eye?
The Qing'an Temple: History Of the three main temples, the Qing'an gong is the oldest by far. When people from Zhangzhou County began to settle in the Jilong region in the late 18th century, they established a small temple to Mazu in the hills to the west of the harbor, at least according to one account. Although the early Chinese settlers of Taiwan famously and often violently divided themselves by native-place loyalties, particularly between those from Quanzhou and Zhangzhou, one thing that they all agreed upon was the importance of Mazu, a deity with special connections to sea-faring peoples like those of China's southeastern coast. As the numbers of Zhangzhou residents increased, and they congregated on the flat lands just south of the harbor, local leaders moved the Mazu temple to its present location and gave it the name of the Qing'an Temple. Existing sources reveal little about the temple's early history, much like that of the town in which it was built, and do not reveal its position within the network of Mazu temples Chinese settlers established across Taiwan. Chinese societies organize their temples in hierarchies of parent and branch temples, connecting them with a ritual of "dividing incense" (fenxiang), through which parishioners establish a new branch by carrying incense from the parent temple, to which pilgrims return during important festivals to renew the connection by burning incense. The Qing'an was likely a part of the network centered on Beigang's Chaotian Temple, the most important Mazu temple in Taiwan. Regardless of its institutional heritage, the Qing'an Temple quickly became the most important sacred space in Qing-era Jilong.