Revolutionary Martyrs’ Shrine, a House, and a Temple

I returned to Taipei from Tainan by high-speed train this morning. A little after 1:00, I checked into my hotel, settled in a bit, and then headed out to see the National Martyrs’ Shrine. Walking there would have taken close to an hour and there are no good rapid transit options, so I took an Uber.

I walked back from there, but I took in a couple of additional sights along the way to break up the walk. Those stops were the Lin Antai Historical House and the Xingtian Temple.

But first a boring anecdote about checking into my hotel.

I’m staying at the same DoubleTree hotel I stayed at for five nights at the start of my time in Taiwan.

I don’t know if you know DoubleTree’s schtick, but when you check in they give you a free, warm chocolate chip cookie. I’ve only been at DoubleTrees a few times before and, until this trip, those few times were all in North America. I assumed the chocolate chip cookie was just a North American thing, but no. I got my cookie the first time I checked into the Taipei DoubleTree and again today.

I enjoy the cookies. I was here for five nights the first time, but I got only one cookie during that time. I’m here for one night now and still got one whole cookie. Maybe I should have checked out and in each day the first time. Maybe not.

The phone rang not much more than a minute after I got into my room. Naturally, it was the front desk. Who else is going to call me in Taipei?

The conversation went something like this:

Me: Hello?

Front Desk: Hello. Is your room okay?

Me: Yes, it’s very nice. Thank you.

FD: I see that your birthday is in a few days. We’d like to give you some cake to celebrate it. Would it be okay if we brought it up to your room now?

Me: Why, yes! Thank you very much!

A couple of minutes later, there was a knock on the door and a guy from the hotel handed me a generic “dear valued guest” birthday card and a little box with a slice of cake in it.

DoubleTree is a Hilton brand, and I’m a member of its loyalty program. I don’t remember telling Hilton or the DoubleTree in Taipei my birthday, but all of the hotels I’ve been at on this trip insisted on getting my passport. They scanned in the information page before handing it back to me.

I guess they check guests’ passports for upcoming birthdays.

I don’t stay often enough at Hiltons to get a particularly high status with them, but If they’re going to be so darned nice to me I might have to stay at Hilton-branded hotels more frequently. Gee. Wait. Do you think that might be why they do it? Still, a nice touch.

National Revolutionary Martyrs’ Shrine

In 1969, the first president of the Republic of China (i.e., now Taiwan), Chiang Kai-shek, an authoritarian leader, had a martyrs’ shrine built to honour the spirits of people who had died in the service of their country, mostly in the revolution in China that led to Chiang Kai-shek fleeing to what’s now Taiwan and setting up a government there.

It is a huge structure of what I think of as quintessentially Chinese architecture. Then again, I have many misperceptions about those sorts of things, so you might want to look at the pictures and judge for yourself.

The National Revolutionary Martyrs’ Shrine has a large ceremonial gate by the road. The gate has three portals through it, all of them arched. There is one widish centre portal and two slightly narrower portals flanking it.

Past the gate, there’s a wide and even longer promenade leading to the shrine. On either side of the promenade, there’s a small building, a two-story, Chinese-roofed gazebo, and some lawns and flower beds. The two sides of the promenade are symmetrical. Most of what’s on one side is mirrored on the other.

At the shrine itself, there is a perimeter building around a large courtyard. The main hall of the shrine sits toward the back of the courtyard. The public isn’t allowed into the main hall.

On either side of the courtyard, there are simple, identical memorial halls venerating the dead. On one wall on the long side of each of the rooms are tablets honouring their spirits. A sign in each shrine forbade the taking of pictures of the “niches” in the shrines. I didn’t see anything that fit what I would consider to be niches, so, rather than risk offending anyone, I didn’t take any pictures in the memorial halls.

The memorial hall on one side of the courtyard honoured the civilian dead. The other one honoured the military dead.

Along the inner walls of the perimeter building were busts of some of the martyrs. I’m not sure if the People’s Republic of China would agree that they’re martyrs. But I’m in the Republic of China now, not the People’s Republic of China.

(I’m reminded of dialogue from Monty Python’s “Life of Brian” about the People’s Front of Judea versus the Judean People’s Front, but never mind that. It’s irrelevant here.)

Both my guidebook and my walking tour app say that a highlight of a visit to the National Revolutionary Martyr’s Shrine is the changing of the guard every hour on the hour.

I arrived at about a quarter to the hour. There were only a very small number of visitors to the Martyrs’ Shrine anywhere within my eyesight at the time. Having a while to wait before the guard-changing ceremony, I went in to take a look around first.

At five minutes to the hour, I made my way to the front gate where the guardhouse is and from which the fresh guards march down the long promenade to replace the stale guards at the shrine.

Before I got out of the shrine structure, I heard loud, precision stomping coming along the promenade. I guess it’s the changing of the guard that happens on the hour, not the procession along the promenade to the waiting guards.

Despite seeing few people around before then, there was a large crowd following the processing guards. How do other people know about these things? Do they get memos from the guards telling them that the procession starts earlier than on the hour? Why didn’t I get the memo? The world is conspiring against me, I tell ya.

The guards at the Martyrs’ Shrine do some slow, somewhat silly walking (apologies again to Monty Python) to the waiting guards. At the time of the exchange, there is more somewhat silly stomping as the old guards step down off their platforms and the new ones step up.

Throughout this process, both during the procession to and from the changing and during the changing itself, there are some cool arm movements. There is a twirling of the hand on one arm (the other is holding a rifle), while that arm precisely crooks until the forearm is horizontal in front of the chest while the upper arm remains vertical.

I mock, but I rather enjoyed the ceremony. I didn’t do it justice with my description. I took a couple of short videos. I won’t post them here because I haven’t figured out how to compress videos sufficiently so that my journal won’t scream in agony at the burden if I try to load them. If you’re someone who knows me in real life rather than on this webby thingy, remind me and I’ll show them to you the next time I see you.

Lin Antai Historical House

The Lin Antai Historical House is Taipei’s oldest surviving residential building. The main house was built between 1783 and 1785 and expanded a few times until it reached its current size in 1823.

The house is not in its original location. In 1978, because it was not able to receive a historical designation, it was in danger of being demolished. But there were enough protests that it was, instead, deconstructed, moved, and reconstructed in its current location.

I was able to walk through the house and peer into its rooms. The rooms are of a rather simple construction. The floors were a tan-coloured tile. The walls had white areas and areas of greyish-coloured wood. Most of the furniture was made of dark wood. The rooms were built around a small, open inner courtyard and another smaller, but also open inner courtyard.

There is a long, open-sided pavilion on one side of the property that looks more modern. I don’t know if that was part of the original construction or expansions or if it’s much more recent. I’m guessing the latter.

On the other side, there’s another building. I think it was part of one of the expansions and was residential, but I’m not sure. It now serves as a small museum. There was some sort of private talk (in Chinese) going on in the museum when I was there and I wasn’t allowed in.

This was a creative twist on a theme. Usually, when parts of a sight, or all of a sight, are closed because I’m there, the keepers of the sight feign some sort of construction or renovation to make me think they’re not closing solely to keep me out.

Here, they brought in a bunch of people, including a speaker, to make me think the room was being put to some purpose that would legitimately exclude me. Nice performance, that.

I got most of the information in the first two paragraphs of this section from my guidebook and walking tour app, along with the English language page from the house’s website. There are a couple of reasons for those, rather than the site, being my source.

For one, did I mention the museum was closed to me?

For another, there were some signs around the site outside of the museum that looked informational, but they were almost exclusively in Chinese. I didn’t bother trying to read them with Google Translate.

The only English on the signs throughout the site were, “free“ at the entrance, a few signs telling me not to enter, a few beside furniture in the mains telling me not to sit, and one by a pond telling me “deep water.” There were several Chinese-only signs with too much on them to be telling Chinese speakers only that.

There was probably more English in the museum, but how would I know?

The grounds that the Lin Antai Historical House is currently in are lovely, but I don’t know what the original grounds looked like. There are lawns and trees, two ponds, and structures on either side that look like their fake rock mounds. Visitors can climb steps up those mounds.

One of the ponds is half-moon-shaped. It was drained when I was there. The other pond is off to one side of the property and is irregularly shaped and has a small bridge over it. That one had water in it, and the “deep water” sign I mentioned on one side of it.

I enjoyed the visit, even without the museum.

Xingtian Temple

My guidebook didn’t mention the Xingtian Temple at all, but my walking tour app listed it as a “Must-see.” So, it was a toss-up. But it was vaguely on the way from the Lin Antai Historical House to my hotel, so I stopped in to take a quick look.

According to the app, Xingtian Temple is relatively new, dating to only 1967. Any young folk reading this probably won’t think 1967 is relatively new. But for someone who was bar mitzvahed toward the end of 1965, yeah, that’s newish.

Again according to the app, it’s “dedicated to Guan Yu, who is considered a patron god of business people.” A fat lot of good he’s going to do me now that I’m retired. Who is the patron god of retirement? I want to worship him or her.

Something was going on at the temple today. The front wall of the perimeter building is not all that far back from the street. Today, there were some canopies set up near the sidewalk with unused tables and line control stanchions underneath them.

This didn’t allow me to get far enough back from the wall to get a good, complete photo of it even with the wide-angle lens of my phone. There are some, I want to say carved, columns in front of the wall. But I’m not sure they’re carved. I think they might be formed concrete. There are some white contrast outlines along the shapes of the “carvings.”

Inside the perimeter wall, there is a fair-sized courtyard. The main hall of the temple is behind that. Much of the courtyard is filled with an area with a roof and open sides. Today, under this roof, and a bit in front of it as well, there were snaking lines of approximately a great many people.

They waited their turn to stand in front of one of maybe a dozen or two dozen women dressed in plain blue smocks that looked like they were made of the same sort of material as hospital scrubs.

When one of the women became free, the person at the head of the line would stand in front of her. She then proceeded to wave incense around the person. The woman also did some bowing of the incense sticks in the direction of the person standing in front of her.

I don’t know what that was all about. It is eminently clear that there is a large multiple, maybe even a few orders of magnitude, more that I don’t know about Buddhism than what I do know.

On the parts of the floor of the courtyard that weren’t occupied by this activity, several people were repeatedly throwing crescent-moon-shaped pieces of wood like the ones I described in an earlier post.

And so concluded my activities for the day, with just tomorrow until mid-afternoon to go until I head to the Taipei airport to wait for my flight back home.