Day 23 - The Puppet Museum In Huwei, Wude Temple And Chaotian Temple In Beigang, And The Origin Of The Mazu Festival, The Long Walk South In Taiwan
Day 23 - The Puppet Museum In Huwei, Wude Temple And Chaotian Temple In Beigang, And The Origin Of The Mazu Festival, The Long Walk South In Taiwan
Today was a day that was visually very beautiful.
I must’ve taken hundreds of photos of the puppets, the two major temples, and the painted walls of a local village that we visited today.
We ate breakfast in our elegant hotel’s restaurant in Huwei.
It wasn’t a buffet, and we had to choose the breakfast the night before.
We chose the Taiwanese vegetarian breakfast, which included nine small plates with a variety of tasty dishes.
Many people in Taiwan eat rice porridge for breakfast, instead of rice.
I like rice porridge, which is really just rice diluted in water and cooked until it has a softer texture, but Jules doesn’t eat it.
I finally had an opportunity to practice my Chinese, because the waitress didn’t speak a word of English.
I rehearsed the Chinese words in my head.
First I called her over by using the Chinese word for “Waitress”, which people use to get the attention of a waitress in a restaurant.
She looked baffled by my Chinese, but hurried over.
Then I said in Chinese: “My husband doesn’t like rice porridge, do you have rice?”
She understood everything I said and went to the kitchen to ask.
She returned with a steaming bowl of rice and gave me the thumbs up.
I felt great that my two months of studying Chinese has left some words engraved in my mind.
We checked out of our hotel and walked over to the Huwei glove puppet museum
We still had some time before the museum opened, so we sat in the Starbucks across the street and had matcha lattes.
The museum is really more of a performance center, with theater rooms, a room where people can learn to make puppets, a store and a display room of puppets with an explanation of the folk stories they are used in.
The city of Huwei is known for its hand glove puppets, and it hosts an annual international puppet festival.
As we walked through the museum, we admired the intricately embroidered clothing of the puppets, the heads made from wood, meticulously carved and skillfully painted, and learned about the traditional stories told through this art form.
Jules and I have a collection of puppets from around the world.
We have collected puppets from China, Myanmar, India, Indonesia, Nepal, and even from Taiwan, on one of our earlier trips to the island, when we were not walking.
The day was sunny and bright, 91 degrees with a heat index that made it feel like 95 degrees.
We were melting in the heat, and we were planning to walk 20 kilometers today.
We decided that in order to have enough time to visit the puppet museum in Huwei, two major temples in Beigang, and a small village with painted murals, we would take the bus and cut ten kilometers off our daily walk, and make up the ten kilometers that we would skip today on another day.
In the north of Beigang city stands an amazing temple called Wude Temple.
Wude Temple is one of Taiwan's oldest and largest temples dedicated to the God of Wealth.
The image of the god of wealth, with his black beard, graces many house doors in red frames during the Lunar New Year.
The temple is a masterpiece of art and craftsmanship.
It is one of the most beautiful temples I have seen in Taiwan.
It is also a very busy and prosperous temple, with many devotees, a nice cafe, and an amazing cathedral hall full of statues of gods.
The origin of the temple is said to be ancient. Here is the story:
A couple living in this location owned a Chinese medicine shop that sold herbs and potions.
One day the wife fell into a coma and didn’t wake up for years.
A Temple priest was passing through Beigang, who was known to be a spirit medium.
He told the husband, who was called Chen Maolin, that there was an "inner god" in his house, and told him to put a red character on the doorway and on the wall of the house, and to worship it.
The red symbol was the symbol for "Wealth".
Chen Maolin followed the instructions, and the "inner god" turned out to be Zhao Gongming, the God of Wealth and Martial Arts that is widely worshipped in Taiwan.
The wife was healed and word of the miracle spread throughout the area.
Chen Maolin sculpted a golden statue for the god of wealth, set up an altar in his house for other people who wanted to come and worship, and began to use the name "Wu De Temple".
From the north, we walked through a local neighborhood where the walls were painted with charming murals.
Cats were sleeping on rooftops and old men rode bicycles.
Old ladies peeled oranges and hung laundry.
It was charming to see the quiet life.
The next amazing temple we visited was the Beigang Chaotian Temple.
Our hotel is just across the street from the temple, which is located in the center of Beigang city.
The whole town revolves around the temple, literally and figuratively.
It has a major collection of large-scale woodwork, ornaments, carvings, paintings, and amazing roofs with sculptures of figures decorated with intricate mosaics.
The multi-layered roofs feature dragons, phoenixes, deities, gods, warriors, flowers, angels, mythical creatures, birds and animals, all made of stone and decorated with colorful mosaics of porcelain.
The ceramics were made by skilled artisans.
The temple is also home to Taiwan’s most beautiful “two dragons chasing the pearl of wisdom” design, carved in white stone on the temple’s imperial pathway.
The temple’s interior decorations include one of the island’s most elaborate and valuable octagonal caisson ceilings.
This temple was established in 1644 during the Qing Dynasty and it was one of the first Mazu Temples in Taiwan.
When constructing a new temple for Mazu (Patron Goddess of the Sea), it is customary to ask an existing Mazu temple to impart part of its divine spirit, usually in the form of a statue, to the new temple.
The temple donating the Mazu statue is then referred to as the “ancestral temple,” and it is honored by the new temple’s worshippers with an annual pilgrimage.
Beigang Chaotian Temple was established by Shu Bi, a senior monk from Chaotian Pavilion in Meizhou, Fujian, China.
He brought a statue of Mazu from the pavilion to Taiwan.
He arrived in Bengang and built a temple in honor of the goddess.
The temple has been restored and renovated in 1735 and again in 1837, and in 1855, the temple renovated all of its halls and added a rear hall, giving the complex four rows of buildings.
In 1905, the main hall and the worship pavilion were damaged in a major earthquake.
The temple hired master carpenters to oversee the repairs, which were completed in 1912.
The temple was later declared a national historic landmark.
During the Qing Dynasty, worshippers often made pilgrimages with the statue of Mazu back to its ancestral temple in Meizhou, China.
All pilgrimages were disallowed and suspended during the Japanese occupation of Taiwan, which started in 1894.
But the locals still wanted to commemorate their traditions, and worshippers began to carry the Mazu deity in a procession on the 19th and 20th days of the third lunar month.
This event eventually evolved into the annual spectacle now known as the Mazu Festival.
We checked into our hotel, and walked around the city,
The streets were full of shops selling many local specialties, and offering lots of samples to the tourists,
We tasted many of them and enjoyed the taste and atmosphere of the city.
We really had lots of fun walking around the city, seeing people burn “fake money”, stacked up in hundreds of boxes next to the beautifully decorated stoves, ready for people to burn them, in hopes of financial blessings.
It occurred to me then, that the glove puppet that we had bought in Taiwan many years ago, was actually of the god of wealth.
It is sitting by our kitchen, maybe even bestowing blessings upon our house….
With love and abundance,
Tali
Today’s Stats:
Steps - 14,309
Daily Distance - 10 km.
Total Distance To Date - 350 km
