Chen Huang temple

Although I often come to Hsinchu, I really just go to the Science Park and visit companies; I had never seen much of the city itself. It turns out it has a famous temple called Chen Huang temple, and I got a chance to visit this time.

It's one of those densely painted Asian buildings with details everywhere, red and gold and black, dragons and swirls, columns and curliques. Inside there is incense burning and the space is crowded with furniture, nooks and crannies, and decorations. All along the walls are costumes used in temple festivals. They are masks and body suits wildly painted, of animals and gods. They must be pretty neat festivals.

This time of year, there were also many paper-mache-like decorations of roosters because it was just Chinese New Year a few weeks ago. Schoolkids from various schools had made the figures on a set template of (ironically) chicken wire, but each had turned out unique in color and style.

We saw people praying there to the temple gods, who are apparently representative of the spirits of the city people. To pray, they take a couple of crescent-shaped pieces from a basket, make their request, and throw the crescents to the floor. They are shaped such that one side has a ridge and is less likely to be on the bottom. If they land both upside-down (on the ridges), the request was not stated clearly and cannot be granted ("please try again"). Both right-side-up means "no" and one of each means "yes" (I think).

We also heard some musicians practicing traditional Chinese music in preparation for the next festival. It's interesting to hear that type of music-- which I usually only hear in the context of a performance-- in its rougher form.