With Lovers’ Day around the corner, believers visiting the deity of marriage and love at the Xia Hai City God Temple (霞海城隍廟) in Taipei have recently increased, staff at the temple said.
As of April, the temple said it had already received more than 3,300 worshipers who have returned to the temple to thank the deity for granting their wishes.
Located on Dihua Street (迪化街), the temple has been the home of the deity of marriage and love, also called the Old Man under the Moon (月下老人), since 1971 for the sole purpose of bringing couples together in marriage.
Photo: Tsai Wei-chi, Taipei Times
The fame of the temple had spread across the nation by 2002, not only drawing Taiwanese, but also Japanese and Chinese tourists, who often come to Taiwan to pray at the temple in the hopes of finding their other half, temple staff said.
Staff say statistics kept by the temple since 2000 show the deity had helped more than 61,000 men and women who had come to pray at the temple find love or marriage.
More than 5,000 boxes of marriage cakes have been sent to the temple by newlyweds annually in a gesture of thanks for the deity since 2005, the temple said, adding that the highest number was in 2008, when the temple received more than 9,316 boxes.
Because last year was the nation’s centenary, many couples chose that auspicious time to get married, with 7,871 couples coming to the temple to thank the deity last year, the temple said, adding that it estimated there would be about 7,000 people this year as well.
Titan Wu (吳孟寰), who works in the temple’s publicity department, said that as Lovers’ Day draws closer, the temple is seeing a steady increase of visitors.
Set on the seventh day of the seventh month of the lunar calendar, the day is, according to myth, the one day when a daughter of the Goddess of Heaven can cross the Milky Way to meet her husband on Earth after the lovers were separated by a mandate form the Emperor of Heaven.
While men formerly made up only 30 percent of the visitors, in recent years the proportion of men visiting the temple has increased to 40 percent, Wu said, adding that in the past, older men or women came to the temple to ask for the deity’s blessing for their children, but now they were often also looking for either another marriage, or simply someone to keep them company in their old age.
Wu said that when first visiting the temple, one must prepare a lead coin, a length of red string and some offering, usually sweets commonly seen at weddings, and after praying in front of the figurine symbolizing the presence of the deity, the supplicant has to pass both string and coin above the incense holder clockwise three times, then keep the coin and string in their wallet or purse.
People most often want to know when they will be meeting their other halves, but Wu said that in his experience, at the quickest it takes three months, but some must wait for seven or eight years.
“As long as you believe, the Old Man under the Moon never disappoints,” Wu said.
Wu cited a recent example of a taxi driver who came to thank the deity. The man had visited the temple after he had been going out with his girlfriend for three months.
The very next day after his visit to the temple, his girlfriend told him that she had dreamed of an old man who kept saying good things about the boyfriend and how he was a good man to give herself to in marriage, Wu said, adding that the two were married soon after.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching