aeeble

Guang’an Temple was founded quite early; among the more than seventy Kai-Zhang Sheng-wang temples island-wide it is one of the oldest, and it still houses many antiquities. Especially noteworthy is a pair of small stone-lion candle-holders whose unusual shape is now rarely seen. Tradition says they date from the temple’s founding, making them more than two hundred years old. In the shrine, openwork golden dragons glitter amid splendor; the Kai-Zhang Sheng-wang sits in their midst, ruddy-faced with a long beard, majestic beyond measure. The generals Fu-shun and Fu-xin, one holding a seal and the other a sword, stand in solemn dignity to left and right. In the left shrine is enshrined Lord Guan, candle in hand, whose righteousness touches the clouds; in the right shrine the Earth God who guards the village, gentle and kindly. It is said that during the Japanese Taishō era (1912-1926) the second-prince statue of Kai-Zhang Sheng-wang (a general seated on a turtle) was taken to Jian-ding Sheng-wang Temple (Neihu Bishan Rock Kai-Zhang Sheng-wang Temple) for an eye-opening consecration rite. When the ceremony ended the devotees placed the prince’s statue in a small palanquin to carry it back to Jinbaoli Street temple, but the chair suddenly flew out of the temple and vanished. Frantic, the believers hurried over hill and dale toward their home temple; passing Gong-guan-lun (on the border of Wanli’s Huang-tan village and Jinshan’s Wu-hu village beside Turtle Mountain) they heard a passer-by say that moments earlier a small chair bearing a god had flown overhead toward Jinbaoli Street. When the devotees reached their temple they found the second-prince statue and its chair already on the altar; everyone proclaimed it a miracle. To this day, every year at the Gong-guan-lun temple festival the second prince is welcomed to that district to receive worship.