Two women were praying in front of the doors of Xingtian Temple
When you step into the grounds of Xingtian Temple in central Taipei, it is striking how earnestly people pray, as if the city’s usual clamor had been left behind at the gate. One of Taiwan’s most prominent temples, Xingtian is a place of devotion not only for tourists but also for locals, and even on weekdays the flow of worshippers never ceases. Normally, people stand before the main hall, incense in hand, to make their petitions. Yet in this scene, two women stood in an unusual spot—before a door at the edge of the courtyard, quietly pressing their palms together in prayer.
Was this an act of deliberate intention, or merely a whim? There is no admission fee to pass inside, so why remain outside at the threshold? Then I recalled that in Taiwanese temple culture, the place one prays is often chosen according to the type of request being made: prosperity at the main hall, health at a side shrine, and so on. I have no way of knowing which scriptures these women might have followed in choosing their location, but at least they left me the space to speculate.
Behind them, the wall bore bold inscriptions of virtues like “Faith, Righteousness, Loyalty, Integrity.” With such words as backdrop, their solemn posture before the door looked almost less like devotion than like applicants waiting to be interviewed for a civil service exam. Perhaps the most human scene in all of Taipei lies here, within the solemn grounds of Xingtian Temple. The worshippers may well be communing with the divine, yet for the onlooker, it is hard not to lapse into secular associations. Faith, after all, is something not so easily communicated to outsiders.
| Apr 2007 PEOPLE TAIWAN | |
| PRAY TAIPEI TEMPLE WOMAN |
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PHOTO DATA
No
822
Shooting Date
Jan 2007
Posted On
April 3, 2007
Modified On
September 3, 2025
Place
Taipei, Taiwan
Genre
Candid Photography
Camera
CANON EOS 1V
