Luodong Zhen'an Temple Audio Guide

Zhen An Temple: what does the audio guide cover?

1. 01

   Welcome to Luodong Zhen An Temple

   Welcome to Luodong Zhen An Temple, a Mazu temple in Renhe Village, Luodong Township, in Yilan County, Taiwan. Its local name is 羅東震安宮. It stands right in the busiest part of town, where Zhongzheng Road meets Minzu Road. Shops and traffic crowd around it, and the temple sits calmly in the middle of it all. This is the oldest Mazu temple in Luodong's old town, and the goddess Mazu, Empress of Heaven, is its main deity. Over the next few stops you will hear about a wandering monk, a typhoon, a fire, an earthquake and a birthday procession that still circles four townships. Not every date in this temple's story is settled, and I will tell you where the accounts differ as we go.

2. 02

   Luodong Zhen An Temple: A Monk, a Statue and a Harbor

   Let's begin with the temple's founding legend. The inscription on the temple wall says a wandering monk carried a golden Mazu statue across the sea from the Mazu temple at Meizhou in Fujian, in China. Tradition says he came ashore at the port of Jialiwan and eventually settled in Luodong. Soon afterward he began collecting donations to build a temple. The people of Dongshi, meaning the area south of the Lanyang River, gave generously. According to this account, Luodong Zhen An Temple was founded in 1837, in the Daoguang reign of the Qing dynasty. The exact founding date is a debated point. Earlier records are vague. A Japanese-era temple register says only that the temple was about a hundred years old, from the Jiaqing reign. A stone inscription set up in early 1925 says roughly 90 years had passed since the beginning, which points to around 1835. So two accounts survive: a precise founding in 1837, and a looser estimate near 1835. What is clear is why the temple mattered. In the late Qing, Luodong had a waterway to Jialiwan port, and local people came here to pray for the safety of their boats and cargo. That is how the incense here grew so strong.

3. 03

   Luodong Zhen An Temple: Typhoon, Fire and Earthquake

   This temple has been knocked down and rebuilt more than once. According to the Lanyang Museum, a typhoon destroyed it in 1867. A man from Wujie village, Huang Yongzai, led the rebuilding, and the people of Dongshi raised 4,000 yuan for a temple of three halls. Two Buddhist masters, Zhenle and Shengqin, are recorded as abbots in those years. Then came the turn of the dynasties. In 1894, as Qing rule gave way to Japanese rule, a fire destroyed the temple. In 1904 Huang Liyan of Wujie led a new effort, and Dongshi residents raised 4,600 yuan for a temple of a single hall. Other accounts place the fire and the rebuilding a year or two earlier, in 1892 and 1905, so the exact years vary. The building you see today comes from the early 1920s. One account says an earthquake in 1922 damaged the temple, and Hu Qingsen led the reconstruction. Another official record dates the surviving structure to a renovation in 1923. Later, in 1979, the township mayor and the temple manager Wu Muzhi agreed the aging temple needed work. The renovation replaced the roof, repaired the beams and columns, and laid terrazzo floors. It was finished in 1982.

4. 04

   Luodong Zhen An Temple: Halls, Deities and a Town Festival

   Luodong Zhen An Temple faces east and has three halls: a front hall, a main hall and a rear hall. Mazu presides in the main hall. In the rear hall, the ground floor honors Guanyin, the Buddhist bodhisattva of compassion, with Bi Gan, an ancestor of the Lin family, as a secondary deity. Upstairs are the Three Officials, with Guan Sheng and the Kaizhang Holy King beside them. An old Taiwanese saying goes, "every home has Guanyin, every household has Mazu," and here the two stand under one roof. The temple's reach was wide. Under Japanese-era records, its ritual territory covered the whole Luodong district, and it ranks with Dian An Temple as one of the two great public temples of old Luodong. It sits near the southern end of the main north-south road, close to the Nanmen canal, which was once a key water route. The liveliest day is the twenty-third day of the third lunar month, Mazu's birthday. There is opera, and the deity is carried in procession through Luodong, Wujie, Dongshan and Sanxing. In the 1960s the temple's land was donated to the township office, and in 2004 the township decided to return it to the temple.

5. 05

   Before You Head Off

   Before you go, take a moment on the street outside Luodong Zhen An Temple. Notice how close the temple sits to the shops and traffic, and picture the same spot when boats on the nearby canal still mattered to the people who came to pray here. You might also step inside and look at the temple's three halls, and at how Mazu and Guanyin share the building. See if you can picture the layers of history that came before the walls in front of you, from the typhoon to the fire to the earthquake. If you are visiting around the twenty-third day of the third lunar month, the temple takes on a very different energy. It is worth finding out whether the birthday celebrations match your travel dates, because that is when the temple is at its most lively.