Shilin Shennong Temple

Besides the three doors of the Sanchuan Hall, each side wing also has a door at the front. Because Shennong Dadi is a deity of imperial rank, the temple front may have five or more doors, to show the deity's high status. In imperial China, the court required a temple's architectural form to match the rank of the deity it enshrined. The temple was originally called Zhilan Temple and was dedicated to Fude Zhengshen, the earth god (Tudigong). When Shilin residents rebuilt it during the Qianlong reign, they gave the roof swallowtail ridges, a style reserved for deities of imperial rank. This showed how important the earth god was to the settlers who opened up the land, but it also made the temple too grand to comply with the rules. To avoid demolition as a penalty, local residents added Shennong Dadi, a deity of imperial rank, as the principal deity. The change shows how Han Chinese temples, the ritual order and local belief compromised and merged with one another. The temple has been rebuilt many times but keeps many old objects, such as the carved stone dragon columns in front of the Sanchuan Hall, stone beams and carved stone windows, a longevity tablet from the Qianlong reign, an incense burner from the Xianfeng reign, and Qing-dynasty statues of Shennong Dadi and Fude Zhengshen. The columns on both sides of the main hall have stone columns from the Japanese colonial period set into them, and the main hall keeps its wall design from that period; the Guanyinshan stone used is typical of its time and hard to reproduce now. The temple also keeps several stone steles recording its repairs and donors, and a paper-burning pavilion (jingzi ting) where paper bearing writing was burned. These record the development of Shilin and its strong literary tradition in earlier times. Several statues of Shennong Dadi are enshrined here. Statues of Shennong Dadi usually take one of two forms. One is a primitive man, naked and barefoot with leaves round his shoulders and waist, holding golden ears of rice, symbolising the invention of agriculture and the passage from primitive life to civilisation. The other wears imperial robes and a crown, symbolising his exalted place as an ancestor of Chinese civilisation and of the Chinese people. The Shennong Dadi here takes the primitive form and has two kinds of face, red and black. The red face shows the healthy colour he gained from eating the five grains after he invented farming. The black face shows his face darkened after he mistakenly ate a poisonous herb, recalling his sacrifice in searching out medicinal herbs for people. The temple also has many jiaozhi pottery works, fired with coloured glazes at high temperature. They were made by Chen Zhuanyou (born 1911), a disciple of the Hong Kunfu school and one of the 'Five Tiger Generals', the leading decorative craftsmen in Taiwanese temple building in the mid-20th century. Jiaozhi pottery in Taiwanese temples often shows scenes from traditional opera, and one story on one wall panel is called a chutou. The inner beams of the Sanchuan Hall carry six jiaozhi pottery chutou. With the shuiche du panels near the eaves on the front hall walls and the duikan du panels on the facing side walls, there are 12 in all. Each panel has at least seven figures, so there are many figures in total, and their poses are finely detailed and full of presence. Together they preserve a large body of traditional decorative craft.

Translated by DealTaipei from Taiwan's national tourism database. Sources are on the terms page.