北港朝天宮

[英文]The Beigang Chaotian Gong 北港朝天宮 is one of 100s of Taiwanese temples dedicated to the goddess Mazu 媽祖, a protector of sailors and fishermen, and therefore very popular in coastal Fujian province, the ancestral home of most Taiwanese. According to legend, Mazu was born in Fujian Province, Weizhou 渭州 in the early 1000s AD. At the age of nine she began to read books, burn incense, and worship the Buddha. At the age of 13 she mastered the esoteric Daodian lun, and began to rescue men lost at sea. The temple in Beigang was first built in 1694. The Chaotian Gong is one of the island$s oldest Mazu temples, and was considered the paramount Mazu temple in Japanese colonial times. In the 1920s, the Chaotian Gong attracted between 400 to 700 thousand worshippers annually (Nihon chiri taikei 1930 p. 123; Yamaguchi 1991, p. 131). The major annual Mazu festival was held on March 23 (old lunar calendar), drawing crowds numbering in the tens of thousands per day on for the duration of the festival. The celebrants burned incense, circumambulated the temple$s perimeter, and immolated silver paper (Taiwan sotokufu 1932, p. 151). The 1930 Atlas of Imperial Japan and the the 1932 official Guide to Taiwan Railways lavished attention upon Taiwan$s religious practices and festival life with thick descriptions of worship at major temples like Chaotian Gong, and Taiwan$s famous annual processions. By the time Council Warner arrived (August 1937), however, the Taiwan government-general had turned against these manifestations of local color. Governor-General Kobayashi Seizo took his post on September 2, 1936, one year before Warner became US consul. Kobayashi$s vision for Taiwan emphasized cultural unification with the mother country (Japan), and he enforced policies banning the use of Chinese language in schools and print. Kobayashi$s zeal did not leave religion untouched: he also pushed a @reverence to kami Japanese objects of devotion@ 敬神思想 agenda, enforcing @obligatory worship at Shinto shrines wa0155 wa0192 wa0200 wa0255, the reorganization of traditional temples wa0008 wa0012 wa0036 wa0202 wa0280, and the prohibition of long-established local religious activities and festivals wa0015 wa0031 0180 as well as native theatrical performances wa0095 in order to rid Taiwanese of their native consciousness and to promote the $imperial subject movement$ 皇民化@ (Kawahara 2006, pp. 129-30.)