FFF&C's Awesome Adventures in Taiwan: Maokong

One of my favourite places in Taiwan is Zhinan Temple, in the hills outside of Muzha, a suburb of Taipei. While there are more impressive temples, and temples that are more aesthetically pleasing, Zhinan Temple is just very spiritually satisfying. Why is it spiritually satisfying? I put it down to the effort I had to go to in order to find it in the first place, the work it used to take every time to climb up to the temple, and the fact that it is a temple to Lu Dong-bin, who has to be one of the cooler gods in the Chinese pantheon.

I heard of the temple shortly after first arriving in Taiwan, and set-out to find it by myself one weekend. I walked in basically the right direction from Muzha, but climbed the wrong side of the valley, and expended a lot of time and energy climbing up mountain roads through tea plantations until I reached a place where I could see the temple across the other side of the valley. That gave me the bearings I needed to find the temple on a subsequent weekend (after I was chased by farm dogs on my way back down the mountain!).

The correct route from Muzha up to the temple is a beautiful pathway that meanders up the hillside through farms and bamboo groves. You can tell from the pathway that the temple has been lovingly cared-for over many generations, with beautiful old pillars at the side of the track, and alcoves to rest in, and stone sculptures. It is a considerable up-hill hike from Muzha, which adds to the sense of having to earn the right to visit the temple. (Yes, there's long been a road that takes you most of the way up to the temple, and a bus - but what's the point in that?)

In relation to Lu Dong-bin - he's one of the Eight Immortals, and probably one of the coolest ones with his enormous sword in a scabbard across his back.

As an example of what is really neat about him - apparently he had the ability to leap 10,000 miles in one stride, and there is a hill in Jingmei called "Rock of the Mark of the Immortal", where Lu Dong-bin supposedly landed at the end of one of these leaps. As you can imagine, when you travel 10,000 miles you are moving at quite a pace, and Lu Dong-bin left his footprint in a rock at the top of the hill as he landed. I anticipate that he wasn't always a welcome guest in people's homes if he left footprints in stone floors everywhere he went.

Since the time that we were living in Taiwan, they have built a cable car that runs from the entrance to Taipei Zoo, up through the mountains to the top of the zoo, further up to Zhinan Temple, and then up to a place called Maokong - as you can imagine, the addition of a cable car makes some big changes to the economic life of a location. Maokong was originally just a handful of small teahouses up amongst the tea plantations in the hills, and now it's a really booming with restaurants and a lot of visitor traffic from the cable car.

We took the cable car from the entrance to the zoo and went right to the top, upto Maokong, travelling up through the mist at the top of the mountain range. From there we walked along the road, higher into the hills, past lots of farms and scattered restaurants and teahouses, up to the Taipei Tea Promotion Centre. The Tea Promotion Centre had a number of different displays on how different types of tea are made, and a small tea plantation out the back for experimental and display purposes. It was interesting to learn that an important part of tea cultivation on terraces is the type of grass they grow on the terraces to reduce erosion and hold the banks together. With the displays of tea making I was expecting to see traditional equipment and methods in use, so it was surprising to see how modern and industrialised small-scale tea making in Taiwan is these days - lots of stainless steel. The farm area at the back was closed-off because of the wet weather and the slippery paths, and we had to persuade an attendant to let us through. The Taiwanese public liability regime is not one of the most efficient in the world, which tends to mean that on occasions you can see some scary hazards left unfixed and unattended, which tends to make you think that if they were concerned enough to suggest that we shouldn't be walking on the slippery, wet paths we probably shouldn't have. Anyway, it was worth it to get to see the different varieties of tea plants up close. The Chinese word for "camellia" is 茶花 or "tea flower", and I'd always understood that tea camellias were Camellia sinensis (or Chinese camellia) while ornamental camellias were Camellia japonica (or Japanese camellia). It wasn't surprising to find that there were some Camellia sinensis with some interesting flowers, but I was a little surprised to find that they appeared to be using at least some Camellia japonica for tea-making.

From Maokong we took the cable car back down to Zhinan Temple. It was odd to have been to the temple literally scores of times, yet for this to be the first time we had ever approached it from above, due to the location of the new cable car station. The temple was good, but I think the kids struggled to relate to what it all meant. At the temple we got to see people going through the ceremony to cleanse themselves with incense, or rid themselves of evil spirits or disease.

The walk down from the temple was a little hair-raising. Because of the cable car, it appears that hardly anyone uses the old stone stairway anymore, and so it was mossy and slippery due to lack of use. We were overtaken by a hiker who told us that the trick was to walk right in the middle of the track, where the moss was generally most worn away.

In the old days there used to be a thriving community of restaurants and shops just below the temple, selling things like incense and refreshments to the pilgrims. Interestingly, this time it was pretty desolate - the economic activity that had been generated at Maokong by the cable car had meant a corresponding drop in economic activity downhill fron the temple, because hardly anyone walked that way anymore.

One interesting thing we did see in the handful of miserable shops that were still there was a fortune teller using a bird in a bamboo cage to tell people's fortunes. Presumably the bird selects pieces of paper, and the fortune teller draws conclusions about the future from bird's choices.