Sunrise and Sunset Adornment ‧ The Beauty at Her Dressing Table
The Bamboo Industry and the Story of Li Yong
● Yanping’s Dressing Table
At sunrise she adorns herself; a beauty appears.
The five villages whose names begin with “Yan” (Yanping, Yanshan, Yanzheng, Yanhe, Yanxiang) take Yanping as their earliest center of development. Formerly called Dongpola (Dongpoluo), it was renamed in honor of Koxinga (Zheng Chenggong), the Prince of Yanping, whose spirit is enshrined in Shadong Temple. Hence the spring, county-wide, and autumn temple festivals.
The legend of Shadong Temple is “At sunrise she adorns herself; a beauty appears; the Mirror-Cave reflects,” or “At sunset she adorns herself….” It is said that Emperor Jiaqing once passed this way and spoke a single golden sentence, causing the local geomancy to shift: the “Mirror Terrace” stands opposite Mirror Mountain in Yanzheng Village, tightening the bond between mirror and beauty. To promote the tale of the Mirror Cave, native sons Liu Yuyou (later magistrate of Nantou County) and Wu Dunyi erected a Mirror Terrace behind Shadong Temple, giving the myth a stage.
Sunset adornment or sunrise adornment—once imagined as polar opposites—thus generated the geomyth that the “dressing-table” landscape had been broken.