Taipei’s Baoan Temple
(保安宮) is probably best known as one of the finest examples of restoration undertaken on an ancient Chinese temple. The decades-long project was initiated by temple director Liao Wu-chih (廖武治) and earned UNESCO’s Asia-Pacific Heritage Award in 2003.
Liao’s vision, however, is not restricted to the dead materials of the past: The Baosheng Cultural Festival (保生文化祭) is one of the many events the temple uses to engage the local community. It’s also an invaluable opportunity to witness Taiwan’s religious culture at its most authentic.
PHOTO IAN BARTHOLOMEW, TAIPEI TIMES
Though the festival officially opened last week and runs until June 28, this weekend sees highlights including parades and performances tomorrow starting at 10am and culminating with the Fire Lion event at 7:30pm. On Sunday, members of the Baoan Temple congregation will demonstrate their devotion in the ancient ceremony of fire-walking (過火), now only rarely practiced in Taiwan. This event is the highlight of the nativity rituals for the Baosheng Emperor, the main deity worshiped at Baoan Temple, who this year is believed to be 1,030 years old.
Starting at 10am tomorrow, the main courtyard of the Baoan Temple will host some of the country’s most highly regarded traditional performance groups, including the Songjiang Formation from Neimen, Kaohsiung County (高雄內門宋江陣), the Flower Drum Formation from Tapu in Yunlin (雲林大部花鼓陣), and the Twelve Grannies Formation from Hsuehchia, Tainan County (學甲十 二婆姐陣). The three groups have played an important part in reviving traditional street performance styles that had been in danger of dying out. To have these groups all in one place, especially so far from home, is a rarity. It also typifies the kind of commitment to ancient art forms for which Baoan Temple has become famous. At 1pm, these groups will join a parade through the Talungtung (大龍峒) and Tataocheng (大稻埕) districts, the heart of old Taipei.
The day’s festivities culminate with the Fire Lion event, in which a fabricated lion stuffed with various types of fireworks is ignited in a spectacular display that typically lasts more than 10 minutes. As with similar events such as Yenshui’s Beehive Firecracker Festival (鹽水蜂炮) and Bombing Handan (炸邯鄲), the purpose of this pyrotechnic display is to drive away evil spirits and pestilence.
PHOTO COURTESY OF BAOAN TEMPLE
Sunday’s rituals begin at 8am when elaborate obeisances to the Baosheng Emperor, who is revered as a god of healing, are conducted. The sacred precincts are closed off to the general public at certain times during these celebrations, but technology allows for viewing of the (to some) mind-numbingly tedious succession of incantations and ritual genuflections by the curious and the faithful. At 1:30pm (approximately, as the preparations are complex), the weekend’s festivities culminate with the fire-walking ritual, when members of the temple community walk over a specially prepared 20m-long strip of white hot coals in the temple’s courtyard. The ancient rite has a visceral intensity rarely seen in sanitized modern religion, whatever one might believe about the scientific or spiritual qualities that make it possible.
Through the end of June, Baoan Temple will also host gezai opera (歌仔戲) and other musical performances. In another revival of tradition, some of these are “competitive” performances, when two or more troupes stage productions at the same time and seek to draw the attention of audience members away from their rivals. The next competitive show is on Monday between 7pm and 9:30pm and pits the Lanyang Opera Troupe (蘭陽戲劇團) against the Yihsin Opera Troupe (一心戲劇團).
These celebratory performances will be followed by more exclusively religious and community-oriented events — local history tours and seminars on traditional street theater — in the following weeks. A detailed list of upcoming activities can be found at the Baoan Temple Web site, www.baoan.org.tw. Baoan Temple is located at 61 Hemi St, Datong Dist, Taipei City (台北市大同區哈密街61號).
From censoring “poisonous books” to banning “poisonous languages,” the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) tried hard to stamp out anything that might conflict with its agenda during its almost 40 years of martial law. To mark 228 Peace Memorial Day, which commemorates the anti-government uprising in 1947, which was violently suppressed, I visited two exhibitions detailing censorship in Taiwan: “Silenced Pages” (禁書時代) at the National 228 Memorial Museum and “Mandarin Monopoly?!” (請說國語) at the National Human Rights Museum. In both cases, the authorities framed their targets as “evils that would threaten social mores, national stability and their anti-communist cause, justifying their actions
Taiwanese chip-making giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) plans to invest a whopping US$100 billion in the US, after US President Donald Trump threatened to slap tariffs on overseas-made chips. TSMC is the world’s biggest maker of the critical technology that has become the lifeblood of the global economy. This week’s announcement takes the total amount TSMC has pledged to invest in the US to US$165 billion, which the company says is the “largest single foreign direct investment in US history.” It follows Trump’s accusations that Taiwan stole the US chip industry and his threats to impose tariffs of up to 100 percent
In the run-up to World War II, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of Abwehr, Nazi Germany’s military intelligence service, began to fear that Hitler would launch a war Germany could not win. Deeply disappointed by the sell-out of the Munich Agreement in 1938, Canaris conducted several clandestine operations that were aimed at getting the UK to wake up, invest in defense and actively support the nations Hitler planned to invade. For example, the “Dutch war scare” of January 1939 saw fake intelligence leaked to the British that suggested that Germany was planning to invade the Netherlands in February and acquire airfields
The launch of DeepSeek-R1 AI by Hangzhou-based High-Flyer and subsequent impact reveals a lot about the state of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) today, both good and bad. It touches on the state of Chinese technology, innovation, intellectual property theft, sanctions busting smuggling, propaganda, geopolitics and as with everything in China, the power politics of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). PLEASING XI JINPING DeepSeek’s creation is almost certainly no accident. In 2015 CCP Secretary General Xi Jinping (習近平) launched his Made in China 2025 program intended to move China away from low-end manufacturing into an innovative technological powerhouse, with Artificial Intelligence
RSS