Religion and History in Taiwan

Taiwanese popular religion came across the strait with settlers from Fujian and Guangdong in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and it kept the shape of the villages they left: a temple to a deity brought from a specific home place, an incense burner whose ash carried the connection back to the founding temple, and a festival calendar organised by that lineage of temples rather than by any central authority. Mazu, a Fujianese woman of the tenth century deified as protector of seafarers, is the dominant figure, unsurprisingly for a population that arrived by sea.

The Japanese colonial period from 1895 to 1945 attempted at its end to replace this with State Shinto, demolishing temples and requiring household kamidana, a campaign that failed and left resentment behind. Under martial law the Nationalist government promoted orthodox Buddhism and Confucian ritual while regarding folk temple practice as superstition and banning I Kuan Tao outright until 1987. Democratisation reversed all of it. Temple networks became politically significant, religious organisations were free to organise, and Taiwan became the freest place for Chinese religion anywhere, hosting Falun Gong, Tibetan Buddhist teachers and Chinese Christian groups that operate under restriction on the mainland.