Strange Wrinkles in the Urban Fabric:

They can be found under bridges, on riverbanks, on roadway medians and waterways, in the middle of fields, on rooftops, and in all manner of odd urban nooks and crannies. Their locations can be described as “everywhere and in every weird form.” At times they make one ask, “Why here?”

Wanhua’s Shuiliangong Temple is squeezed into a small triangle of land underneath two highway overpasses and beside a river dike.

Taiwan’s unique street temples

Whereas most Taiwanese take such temples for granted as ubiquitous parts of the built environment, architect Lai Po Wei, a partner at Bio-Architecture Formosana, who studied and worked abroad for many years, sees the strangeness in them. In 2010, he was strolling in the old part of Taipei’s Wanhua District and came upon the Shuiliangong Temple: “I realized immediately that it was an extreme urban oddity, as it was located in a triangle of land bordered by two highway overpasses and a river dyke.” He recalls being astonished. “But with more experience, I now know that there are many such temples.”

In 2013 he returned to Taiwan and found work as an instructor at National Cheng Kung University. He also began to do survey work, spending four years looking for temples and gathering information about them, with a concern for both their architecture and their placement in the urban fabric. The fruit of these efforts is Parasitic Temples, his book on curiously situated street temples. Using photographs and architectural drawings, it documents the relationship between temples and their surrounding environments in both Chinese and English. The architect explains: “The bilingual text was in order to give our work more international reach. We really want to let foreigners know more about Taiwan.”

Most of these temples have long histories, dating back a century or more. Somehow they have managed to skirt urban planning and construction laws and coexist with the cities growing around them. 

Although temples of these sorts exist in other areas with ethnic Chinese populations, such as Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia, there are a greater variety of them in Taiwan. “They may not be entirely unique to Taiwan, but there are a lot of them here, and many unusual examples.”

Lai Po Wei observes that the relationships of these street temples to their environments in Taiwan are quite unusual. Although examples exist in other places with ethnic Chinese communities, such temples are weirder and more numerous here.

Located beside an exit lane in the parking deck for the Binjiang Market, this Earth God temple provides spiritual support for the market’s operations day and night.

Searching: Old school and high tech

Early on, Lai and his team took an “old school” approach to finding temples—searching in person. Though rooted in Lai’s personal curiosity, the efforts attracted a lot of young people in the field of architecture, and even some foreign friends volunteered to help. At the beginning, groups would come together to survey urban districts on weekends. They sent photographs to a Line group chat, leaving Lai to confirm a temple’s type. 

Thanks to modern technology, the team then raised their game by leveraging the websites of local departments of civil affairs to gather data on both registered and unregistered temples. There are more than 30,000 of them all told. They took those addresses and searched for them on Google Earth. In that manner they could quickly find temples worth documenting. Participants would take advantage of trips planned for business or leisure to visit these temples and send back photos.

Lai explains that they classified some temples based on how they coexist with the surrounding natural environment, such as temples under canopies of trees or in caves created by coastal erosion.

Temples that are merged into the built environment are mostly found in cities. These include temples found in odd corners of parking decks or markets. Otherwise, to overcome the lack of space in cities, temple complexes may have expanded vertically—or sometimes over streets and sidewalks. Others squeeze into spaces beneath bridges, on levees, underground, or even in phone booths.

“Over the course of more than four years we catalogued 500‡600 temples, from which we chose 36 examples to introduce in the book.”

Lai Po Wei employs architectural illustrations to better reveal the relationship between temples—in this case a roundabout temple—and their environments. (courtesy of Lai Po Wei)

The Shengfu Temple in Taipei’s Zhongshan District is classified as a “sidewalk extrusion temple,” but temple representatives note that it has existed here since 1914, and used to be surrounded by farmland. With high-rises built around it in an expanded city, it has become an oddity.

Much loved by people today, mergers of shrines with nature are a common type of small temple. Here we see a tree temple.
(photo by Lin Min-hsuan)

Located on the left bank of the Keelung River, the Bailing Temple is equipped with wheels to allow it to escape rising waters when the Keelung River floods. (courtesy of Lai Po Wei)

The origins explain the oddity

When speaking about the origins of these temples’ strangeness, “Most likely the temples were originally in their current locations, and the surrounding infrastructure came later, rather than the other way around,” explains Lai. “There could have been several reasons for that: Maybe the deities were unwilling to move, or maybe their devotees couldn’t find a suitable place to move them to.”

Typically, religious architecture is thought to aspire to create spaces that are departures from daily life, but Lai believes that situation is quite different in Taiwan. “As far as Taiwanese are concerned, these are spaces connected to daily life, with a high frequency of use.” They serve as neighborhood community ­centers, where people can discuss public affairs. They are social spaces for the older generations.

Consequently, believers always hope that temples are built nearby, within 500 meters of their homes. To have temples conveniently located nearby, our great grandparents’ and earlier generations were willing to donate money to build them. It made it easy to share good news with the deities or to seek their counsel when anxious. They would visit these local temples every two to three days.

These temples predated the cities that grew up around them. They then adjusted to their new environments as the cities developed around them. That explains why they now blend into the urban fabric in all manner of unusual ways that nonetheless bear witness to their intimate relationship with everyday life in Taiwanese society.

The Tiande lift temple on the right bank of the Keelung River has become a refuge for many deities in distress.

Bearing witness to the creativity of local residents and the flexibility of the urban environment, the Tiande Temple on the right bank of the Keelung River can be lifted upward to evade flood waters.

The creative vitality of common people

When asked which of the temples he finds most interesting, Lai cites an island Earth God shrine in Touliao, a village in Taoyuan’s Daxi District. “Guess what? There wasn’t water there originally.” A small reservoir was going to be built there, but the Earth God didn’t want to move, so the local community raised the height of the plot of land on which the shrine sits and the reservoir was dug around it, creating a man-made island. The faithful can only reach the shrine by boat.

Space constraints within cities may prevent temples from expanding horizontally, forcing them to grow upwards instead. For example, the well-known ­Fazhugong Temple in Taipei’s Dadaocheng area, which has been rebuilt several times because of road widenings, now has its first floor elevated to allow traffic to pass underneath, and so belongs to the “overstreet” temple category.

“These street temples are embodiments of the vitality and creativity of so many ordinary people.” Lai cites a “run-and-gun” and a “lift” temple on opposite banks of the Keelung River. Bailing Temple, a run-and-gun temple beneath the Bailing Bridge, has four wheels under it, like a night-market stand. “At first we thought these were for evading the police or city government enforcement officers. But then we discovered that wasn’t so: The wheels are for escaping floods.” When flooding is expected, the temple can be moved to higher ground.

Tiande Temple, located in the Sanjiaodu community on the right bank of the river, is a “lift temple,” which uses technology to evade flooding by elevating as much as seven meters. Rather than being made of concrete, it is constructed of metal panels, which reduces its weight, so it can be lifted. Facing the same issue of flooding, the faithful on opposite sides of the river came up with different solutions. Isn’t that fascinating? 

“The book was a way to collect and organize this information, but it’s not the culmination of our work. We hope to create a GIS [geographic information system] with it, linking it to tourism maps.” In that way more people can go look for these temples on their own.

Fixtures in their neighborhoods, these temples can still be found offering their protection to believers young and old in odd corners all over Taiwanese cities. The enduring presence of these temples and the deities that they house bring the faithful peace of mind.

Classified as an “alley temple,” the Shenmu Temple in Taipei is a demonstration of how to make the best use of limited space in an urban environment.

In Taiwan, temples are part of the scenery of daily life. Every day the faithful visit and have social interactions within them.