One of the most surprising things about the temples was just how alive they were. Nothing like the sterileness of ones in other countries. In a way I felt that this was the china that would have been if the Nationalists had won.<\/p>\n
The first temple I went to was a buddhist one in central Taipei. It was swarming with people, the incense and offering boxes were overflowing. People came and went in a great hurry.<\/p>\n
The second experience was a pagoda out in the suburbs. It was maybe 5 stories tall. A fence surrounded it for crowd control. I went in. The floor was covered in ash from burnt offerings and flowers. I wales past so many people paying their respects to their ancestors. The pagoda was set up for one way walking. Up only. At the top there was a circular caged steel stair case built alongside the pagoda. This was the way down. I walked down and out the spinning metal exit gate. 2012: However, I now wonder if this was actually\u00a0because\u00a0it was the Qingming Festival<\/a>.<\/p>\n I visited various other temples, buddhist, Confucian and Taoist. There were never the huge crowds but always there were many people just there as part of their daily lives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of the most surprising things about the temples was just how alive they were. Nothing like the sterileness of[…]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[559,885,2962,3615,3631,3667],"class_list":["post-12944","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-ramblings","tag-buddhist","tag-confucian","tag-qingming","tag-taiwan","tag-taoist","tag-temple"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yewenyi.net\/wp\/old\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12944"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yewenyi.net\/wp\/old\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yewenyi.net\/wp\/old\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yewenyi.net\/wp\/old\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yewenyi.net\/wp\/old\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12944"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/yewenyi.net\/wp\/old\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12944\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yewenyi.net\/wp\/old\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12944"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yewenyi.net\/wp\/old\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12944"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yewenyi.net\/wp\/old\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}