Bangka Qingshui Temple Audio Guide

Qingshui Temple: what does the audio guide cover?

1. 01

   Welcome to Qingshui Temple

   Welcome to Qingshui Temple, known locally as 清水巖祖師廟 and often simply called the Patriarch Temple. You are standing on Kangding Road in Taipei's Wanhua District, the old Monga quarter, where the city first grew up around the river trade. This temple has watched that neighborhood change for more than two centuries. The temple honors Qingshui Zushi, a Song dynasty monk revered as a protector. His devotees were settlers from Anxi in Fujian Province, who carried his incense across the sea. It belongs to the group called the Three Great Temple Gates of Taipei, alongside Longshan Temple in Monga and Baoan Temple in Dalongdong. It is also counted among the four great Patriarch temples of Greater Taipei, and it is honored as the ancestral temple of the Patriarch temples in the greater Taipei area. Over the next few stops, we will follow the Anxi settlers who raised it, a feud that burned it down, the rebuilding that gave us the temple you see today, and a statue whose nose is said to fall when disaster is near. Take a breath, look up at the roofline, and let's begin.

2. 02

   Qingshui Temple and the Anxi Settlers

   To understand this temple, start with the people who built it. Much of the land around the Taipei Basin was opened up by settlers from Anxi, and for them Qingshui Zushi was a guardian deity. When the Anxi community in Monga decided to build a temple, they chose a man named Weng Youlai as its director. Together they raised 30,000 silver dollars, a large sum for the time. They brought the sacred incense from Qingshui Temple in their ancestral home in Anxi, Fujian Province. Construction began in 1787, in the reign of the Qianlong Emperor, and the temple was completed in 1790. In June of 1817 a typhoon battered it, and Weng Youlai once again went to the community, this time collecting 5,000 silver dollars for repairs. A temple is never finished once and for all. It lives on because people keep paying for its roof. That is why Qingshui Temple is more than a place of worship. It stands as a monument to the Anxi immigrants and to the rise of Monga as a market town. Its incense has also traveled onward. Temples in Xinzhuang, Jingmei and Tamsui were founded by dividing incense from this one.

3. 03

   Fire, Feud and Rebuilding at Qingshui Temple

   The temple you see today is not the original, and its story includes a painful chapter. In 1853 Monga was torn by a violent clan feud known as the Ding-Xia Jiao Pin, a conflict between rival merchant groups, and the temple was destroyed in the fighting. Historians see it as part of the story of how this neighborhood competed and fought as it grew. The community rebuilt the temple in 1867, in the Tongzhi reign. Most of the buildings standing now date from that rebuilding, and later repairs have largely kept the reconstructed appearance. The temple once had a complete layout with a rear hall for Mazu, the Heavenly Mother. That hall is gone and has never been rebuilt, so the temple now has two halls: the front three-passage hall and the main hall behind it. Here is a detail to look for. Two of the temple's older art works survive from the generation before the feud. The brick carvings on the side walls of the front hall date to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and they are the oldest art works in the temple today.

4. 04

   Reading the Architecture of Qingshui Temple

   Now let's look at the building itself. The temple sits facing west, with its back to the east. Its plan is two halls, two connecting corridors and two flanking wings, all wrapped around an open courtyard. The main axis is three bays wide, and with the wings it forms the pattern builders call seven wrapping three. Covered passages link the wings to the main halls, and behind the wings you will find a two-story loft, a special feature of this temple. Behind the altar in the main hall there is also a walkway, a feature rarely seen in Taipei. At the middle door of the front hall stand a pair of sturdy dragon pillars. Look closely at the beams, the stone walls and the pillars, where you will find carved dates naming Qing dynasty reigns. The carving style is plain, thick and robust rather than delicate. For this reason the temple has been described as one of the most characteristic and artistically accomplished Taiwanese temples of the middle Qing period. The Taipei City Government has designated it a municipal historic site, recognizing its historical, cultural and artistic value. Its symmetrical wings and tidy layout are part of what makes it a standard example of traditional temple design. Beyond Qingshui Zushi, the temple also honors Mazu, Guan Yu, the Literary God Wenchang, Ksitigarbha, Confucius, Kuixing and the Earth God, so it is worth looking around the halls for the many deities.

5. 05

   Before You Head Off

   Before you move on, there is one more story to carry with you. The temple's seven statues of Qingshui Zushi include one that devotees consider the most powerful, Penglai Zushi, nicknamed the Nose-Falling Patriarch. Tradition says that when a natural disaster is coming, his nose drops off to warn the faithful, and then returns by itself once the danger has passed. There is also a tale about how the oldest statue came to stay. It says that four monks brought an ancient Buddha statue from Anxi to raise funds, and that after a misfortune struck the temple, the community offered 200 silver dollars to help repair their home temple and kept the statue here for good. Later, when French forces threatened Tamsui in the Sino-French War, popular tradition holds that Taipei was spared because Qingshui Zushi had been invited to help defend it, and the temple's incense grew even stronger. When you step back out, notice how this old temple sits in the middle of a busy modern street. Not far away, in a lane off Guiyang Street Section 2, there is also a small pagoda temple honoring the Pagoda-Bearing Heavenly King, built by local people late in the Qing period to pray for safety through an epidemic. Monga holds many such shrines, each with its own story waiting for you.