Original Carved Structure of the Wanfu Temple
Unknown Taiwanese craftsmen · early twentieth century
Deep inside the Human Cultures Hall you walk unexpectedly into a temple. Red lanterns hang from a carved and painted roof, gilded beams and brackets crowd the ceiling, and an altar glows at the far end. This is the original structure of the Wanfu Temple, a folk religion temple from Kaohsiung in southern Taiwan, which was taken down when its congregation built a larger replacement and was re-erected here, beam by beam, to anchor the museum's galleries on the spiritual life of the Han Chinese people of Taiwan. It is not a reconstruction or a model; the carpentry, carvings and paintings are the real thing.
Look up. Taiwanese temple roofs are held on a forest of interlocking brackets and beams, and every surface is an excuse for decoration: dragons, phoenixes, scenes from operas and novels, auspicious flowers and fruit, all carved in relief and painted in red, gold and green. The columns are carved with coiling dragons, and the doors carry painted guardian generals. Around the temple the museum shows the objects of everyday religion, from incense burners and divination blocks to the paper money burnt for ancestors, and explains the calendar of festivals that structures life in a Taiwanese town.
The Human Cultures Hall opened in 1993 as the Chinese Science Hall and took its present name in 2007 when its scope was widened to include the cultures of Taiwan's indigenous peoples and the Pacific. The temple stands at the meeting point of these stories, since the settlers who built it brought their gods from Fujian across the strait. A memorable detail is the wear on the threshold stone, polished by decades of worshippers stepping over it in Kaohsiung before it came to the museum.
Did You Know? The temple was dismantled in Kaohsiung and reassembled inside the museum, so every carved beam and bracket is the original craftsman's work.
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