Three Temples & Bopiliao Historic Block

After my crowd ordeal at the National Palace Museum this morning, it was time for a little peace and serenity this afternoon. Where better to find peace and serenity than at a temple? Or better yet, three.

The temples I visited were Longshan Temple, Qingshan Temple, and Tianhou Temple.

I also checked out the Bopiliao Historic Block. But that was something completely different.

By the way, I’ve noticed that the spelling of the English version of temple names and the names of other places can vary depending on the source. I suppose that makes sense, seeing as though the names are Chinese or the Taiwanese dialect of it.

I don’t imagine I’m telling you anything you don’t already know, but their language uses an alphabet that isn’t just a little different from ours. It’s of an entirely different structure. In fact, it’s not an alphabet at all, but rather pictograms.

So if it’s a given name that can’t be translated into an English word, then I think someone, say, the writer of an English-language guidebook, takes their best stab at sounding it out in the English alphabet. And different someones have different ideas about the best transliteration. There doesn’t seem to be a body that standardizes that.

So my experience has been that if you’re in a country with a radically different language, and particularly if it has a radically different “alphabet,” and you see the same place name spelled differently in different sources it’s not necessarily a spelling mistake. It may just be that there is no agreed-upon English spelling.

In those cases, my general rule in these pages is to use the spelling that’s in the guidebook(s) and/or walking tour app that I’m using in that location. If they disagree, I arbitrarily choose one. Of course, I’ve been known to make the occasional typo. So I may have created my own unique transliterations periodically. That’s not intentional.

Longshan Temple

Longshan Temple was not the place to go to find peace and serenity. It’s beautiful, but it is in a reasonably busy part of the city, and it seems to be popular with both tourists and worshipers. There might be at least some causal relationship between its beauty and its popularity.

The temple has an elaborate entrance gate topped with several dragons and other decorations. By “gate,” I don’t mean the sort of thing that might be in a fence in someone’s middle-class backyard. This gate has four widely spaced pillars holding up a canopy roof and its dragons.

Beyond the gate is a forecourt. On one side of the forecourt is a small pool filled with colourful fish that I assume are carp. Also in the pool are two fountains spurting water upward. One of the fountains is shaped like a dragon, the other is shaped like a fish. Behind the pool is a large, jagged rock with a waterfall.

On the other side of the forecourt is another small pool. This one has a taller, wider rock behind it, with three waterfalls tumbling over it. And there are more of the same sort of fish in that pool.

Beyond the forecourt is a perimeter building with red-tiled roofs that surrounds the courtyard containing the main hall. Some small shrines in the perimeter building face the main hall. There are several decorations—carved pillars, large painted balls hanging from ceilings, and more—throughout.

The public isn’t allowed into the main hall, but its front is open so I could see inside. Red and gold colours predominate, and there are, naturally, a lot of religious items.

Qingshan Temple

Qingshan Temple is different from most of the temples I’ve seen so far. It’s squeezed tightly between two unrelated, non-religious, nondescript buildings.

Inside, there is a lot of carved woodwork and stonework. There are a couple of opposing figures toward the back on either side of the temple. One wears a robe that is predominantly red, the other is predominantly blue. They looked to me like very weird versions of those old-timey fortune-telling machines with a mannequin inside. I don’t know what the story is behind them.

Inside, there is a small open-air area. There’s a small pool there with rocks, real fish in the pool, and large, fake, green frogs just off to the side.

There is an upstairs in Qingshan Temple with another shrine and a large, decorated pot filled with sand and a lot of burning incense sticks planted in the sand.

Tianhou Temple

Tianhou Temple shares a lot of similarities with Qingshan Temple. It too is squeezed between two neighbours with no space between it and either of the neighbours. But this time, it’s on a shopping street, and both of the neighbours are functioning storefronts.

And again, there are several intricately carved columns in this temple. I couldn’t see all of the columns clearly because a couple of them were surrounded by scaffolding.

The Qingshan also has some statues, including a dragon statue and an elephant statue.

And like Qingshan Temple, Tianhou Temple also has a very colourful upstairs shrine, but I didn’t see any incense vessels up there.

It might have just been a coincidence of the timing of my visits, but there were even more worshippers with incense at Tianhou Temple than at Qingshan. But at Tianhou, worshippers lit their long incense sticks downstairs, typically more than one per person, carried them upstairs, and then brought them back downstairs to be deposited there.

After having to take my shoes off in pretty well every temple shrine I went into in Singapore, Bangkok, and Chiang Mai, I was surprised and pleased that no one took their shoes off in either Qingshan or Tianhou Temple. (They didn’t take them off at Longshan Temple—or the Taipei Confucius Temple and Bao’an Temple I visited yesterday—either, but that didn’t surprise me because no one went into the shrines at those temples; they just got close and prayed in the shrines’ direction.)

Bopiliao Historic Block

Bopiliao Historic Block is a narrow road closed to pedestrians. On its sides are rows of preserved, mostly red-brick buildings that looked to me like they might have been townhomes at one time. Most of them are more than 100 years old.

Today, the buildings on the Bopiliao Historic Block contain primarily art galleries, cultural spaces, and a couple of small museums. One of the museums looked like it was geared to children. The other one has a lot of old pictures of the Bopiliao area and the artifacts from there.

There’s a sign in one of the few rooms (all of them small) in the adult-oriented museum that explains that during the height of the COVID pandemic, Bopiliao became a COVID quick-screening station set up by the Taipei City Hospital. One of the other rooms in the museum is dedicated to that. There are hazmat suits, hospital gowns, and other COVID-related paraphernalia on display there.

A part of one paragraph on the sign in the first room noted that “After the Taipei City Hospital set up an operation here, Covid-19 screening began and Bopiliao’s exhibition hall closed in the fight against the epidemic. While walls displayed historic photos of dental patients waiting in line to have teeth pulled by Rev. George Leslie MacKay, the noted Canadian missionary, people were queueing up in real time for PCR testing and Covid-19 screening. In this way, Bopiliao bore witness to life in the pandemic until the number of confirmed cases gradually decreased and the situation stabilized.”

I tried to find that picture of the Canadian missionary because, did somebody mention Canada? But I didn’t see it.

And so ends another day in Taipei.