Taipei Confucius Temple; Bao’an Temple

As in Singapore and Thailand, my guidebook and walking tours app suggest temples should be a major theme in Taipei. This morning, I visited two: the Taipei Confucius Temple and the Bao’an Temple.

Before getting into that, here’s an update regarding yesterday. In my post about my arrival in Taipei, I expressed my nervousness about discovering a dearth of English here, particularly on restaurant signs and menus near my hotel. I worried that I might have a problem getting by in English here.

I knew this was a Chinese-language country before I came, but I thought there’d be more English for us befuddled tourists. Turns out, there is. Not a lot, but more than I saw yesterday.

Upon walking more this morning, I saw more English than I did yesterday, including on the storefronts of some international brand-name stores and a few signs wishing me a Merry Christmas. And I took the metro this morning, which I hadn’t done yesterday. There is more than enough English there for a hopeless anglophone to navigate it.

Taipei Confucius Temple

The Taipei Confucius Temple is a colourful, beautiful temple built in the late 1920s. Some simple, almost connected buildings surround a square. The roofs of these surrounding buildings consist of red cylinders, with red flat tiles between the cylinders. The forward ends of the cylinders are capped with green.

The small main shrine sits toward the back of the square on a concrete platform wider than the shrine. The platform juts out in front of the shrine to create a stage. The roof is similar to that of the perimeter buildings.

The interior is very red and gold. Unlike the Buddhist temples I’ve seen on this trip, it does not have big statues, just some old musical instruments and religious items that I can’t identify.

I don’t know if the musical instruments are always there. My guidebook tells me that on Saturdays at 10:00 a.m., the temple stages traditional performances in the main hall. Today is Saturday. I arrived shortly before 10:00.

A sign at the temple told me, “The musicians will replicate the ancient ceremony by playing the traditional Octave music instruments and dancers by performing with the music instruments Di and yue,” at 10:30 every Saturday and Sunday.

I had a further look around and waited for the performance.

There are some exhibits, with text in Chinese and English, in small rooms in the perimeter building of the Confucius Temple. One was on ancient mathematics. For example, it told me that calculation in ancient China used a base 10 system as we do, but during the Warring States Period [according to Wikipedia, circa 475 – 256 BCE] they used base 10,000 for larger numbers. So, 1 million was “100 10,000s.” We’re talking more than 2,000 years ago. What did they have that required them to count that high back then? Were they counting grains of sand on a beach?

They also had a good estimate of pi in ancient China. According to an information panel, “Initially given a value of 3, Liu Heng [203/02 -147 BCE] gave it a value of 3.154, while Zhang Heng [78 – 139 CE] calculated pi as v10. Liu Hui’s [circa 225 – 295 CE] algorithm for p was a real breakthrough, as he calculated the value to be 3.14, nearly that which is used today. Zu Chong-zhi [429 – 500 CE], who lived during the Southern and Northern Dynasties calculated the value out to being between 3.1415926 and 3.14159275, the most accurate value computed until the 1600s.”

(All of the dates in square parentheses in the preceding paragraph come not from the signage at the Confucius Temple, but from Wikipedia. I provided the appropriate links above.)

Another exhibit room contained information on calligraphy. In it, I learned that there are multiple forms of Chinese script.

Clerical script was the primary script for writing books in the Han Dynasty. The “lesser seal script” was a unified form in the Qin Dynasty. Regular script was invented during the Eastern Han Dynasty and evolved from clerical script. But there is also cursive script, which can be written quickly, and semi-cursive script, which falls somewhere between regular and cursive script. Who knew?

The exhibit provided panels with examples of each type of script.

Another exhibit room presented information on the history of Confucius and the Taipei Confucius Temple.

Then it was time for the performance.

The musicians, dressed mostly in red, with black hats decorated with yellow piping, positioned themselves toward the back of the concrete stage area in front of the main hall and started playing slow, almost dirge-like music.

Then, seven performers processed in from the two sides of the main hall, four from one side and three from the other. They wore purple outfits and black hats with a different pattern of yellow piping. In their hands, they each held a red cylinder with long feathers flowing out of the top of it. A wide, gold-coloured, patterned band was on each cylinder just below the feathers.

It was the slowest, most deliberate procession I’ve ever seen. They took close to five minutes to walk a distance that I, even at my current level of doddery, could cover in probably 15 to 20 seconds, at most. When they finally made it to centre stage, they slowly, carefully formed two columns of two people, one column of one person to the left of them, and another column of two people to the left of him.

I don’t know if someone was missing or if the individual in the single-person column was supposed to be the focus person. He seemed that way to me, but that might just have been my perception because one of these columns differed from the others.

Once they were in formation, they pulled the feathers out of the red cylinder. It turns out that the feathers and gold band were attached to a red-coloured rod. They then held the red cylinder in one hand and the feathers and rod in the other for most of the remainder of the performance.

The performance involved various synchronized arm movements, some bowing, the occasional putting the left foot out, putting the left foot out in, putting the right foot out, putting the right foot out in, some shallow knee bends, and some deep knee bends. When they finished these movements, they put the feathers and rod back into the cylinder and they then processed out.

All of the movements throughout the performance were done in super-slow motion. In total, it lasted for about half an hour.

After that, it was time for me to leave the Taipei Confucius Museum.

Bao’an Temple

The Bao’an Temple is almost kitty-corner to the Taipei Confucius Temple. Across a street from the Confucius Temple, there’s a small public park that’s quite attractive. It has a small pool with an island. A water-spouting dragon sits on the island. There is also a pagoda-style building, trees, and a cave sculpted out of rock with some colourfully dressed humanoid figures posed in it.

Taipei has an airport closer to the city than the international airport where I arrived yesterday. It must be very close because while I was in the park, I witnessed a couple of passenger jets flying quite low overhead.

Using Google Translate on the English-only sign in front of the park, I learned that the park is associated with the Bao’an Temple, which is across another road from the park.

The Bao’an Temple has a configuration similar to the Taipei Confucius Temple, but its perimeter building is a bit narrower. There are no exhibit areas in its perimeter building, just a series of small shrines.

Unlike the Confucius Temple, which had English translations on nearly all of its many signs, the only English I saw at the Bao’an Temple were on signs in front of the shrines. The English read, “Please don’t enter this room. Thank you for your cooperation.”

There were other signs in the temple, but they displayed only Chinese.

The Bao’an Temple seems to be more of a working temple than the Taipei Confucius Temple. When I was at Bao’an Temple, lots of people were bowing at the shrines and lighting long incense sticks and then sticking the unlit end into pots filled with sand. I saw little of that at the Confucius Temple.

Failures to Launch

I finished at the Bao’an Temple before lunch and decided to visit a small museum. My guidebook highly recommended the AMA Museum, a museum showcasing the history of “comfort women,” sex slaves to service soldiers, during the Japanese occupation of Taiwan.

My guidebook gave me a link to Google Maps for the museum’s GPS coordinates. But I also searched for the museum by name on Google Maps. The two gave me different locations. Despite buying the most recent addition available on Apple Books at the time, my guidebook was published a few years ago. This might explain why it’s given me some bad information about opening times on this trip.

I decided to trust the Google Maps named location, as Google Maps said it was open. When I arrived at the location, it was a somewhat rundown building with closed shutters. I know that there had been a lit sign outside at one point because the wires for the sign were still sticking out of the building, but there was no sign. I checked that I had the right street and street number. I did.

I then looked on Apple Maps. It gave two locations for AMA Museum, one where I was standing and one where my guidebook said it should be. But Apple Maps said the latter was permanently closed, whereas it said the one I was at was open.

The other location wasn’t all that far away, and my guidebook said it was in an old, restored building in a nice shopping district. So, I figured I might as well check it out just in case they had temporarily moved for renovations of some sort and had now moved back. Nope. It wasn’t there.

Ironically, on the way to the AMA museum, I walked along a path with printing on a post that said, in English and I assume Chinese, “Path of Learning Encouragement.” If they wanted to encourage learning, they could have done something to keep the museum open.

After my failure at the non-AMA museum, it was lunchtime. I consulted Google Maps for a restaurant. I found what looked like a nice one close by. I went there. It was currently just a tea shop. They had a menu in the window that looked like the one someone posted a picture of on Google Maps. But they had taped a small hand-printed sign on the menu saying, in English, “COMING SOON.” I guess they suspended their restaurant service for some reason.

I gave up. I found a nearby small hole-in-the-wall restaurant with a few tables. It had pictures of its dishes on the wall, with just Chinese text on them. I found a dish that looked good, used Google Translate to confirm what I was getting, pointed to it, and asked for it. There was a bit of an issue because I had to choose between beef and pork in the spicy, fried rice dish. I managed to communicate that I wanted beef. And I had a somewhat tasty lunch to end my morning.