After years of repairs and renovation, Greater Kaohsiung’s Fongyi Academy (鳳儀書院), attracted more than 10,000 visitors after opening to the public over the weekend, Greater Kaohsiung’s Bureau of Cultural Affairs said yesterday.
About 70 percent of the visitors were families with children, it said, adding that the sites with statues depicting students in classrooms during the Qing Dynasty were the most popular among the visitors.
First built in 1814, the 19th year of Qing emperor Jiaqing (嘉慶), the Fongyi Academy contained a small temple dedicated to the worship of Wenchang Dijun(文昌帝君), a Taoist god of culture and literature who is believed to handle all affairs regarding exams. However, the building was repurposed during the Japanese colonial period.
Photo: Chen Wen-chan, Taipei Times
On Friday last week, the temple was reinvested in a ceremony that recognized the academy as a site for the worship of Wenchang Dijun and included ancient rituals. The ceremony signified that Fongyi Academy would take on the responsibility of continuing the tradition of worshiping Wenchang while maintaining the traditional style of Confucian literary education.
Earlier in the day, Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu (陳菊) led city government officials on a visit to Greater Tainan’s Confucius Temple — at 302 years old, the oldest Confucian temple in the nation — to ask for the branching out of the Wenchang Dijun deity, one of the five literary deities worshiped there.
The act of “branching out” requires a ceremony at the original site of worship that requests approval from the deity, after which the “branch” would be taken back to the intended new site of worship.
Traditionally, it was believed that deities held fiefdoms and that such an act would allow specific deities to receive more worshipers and become stronger.
Greater Tainan and Greater Kaohsiung share more than geographical closeness; they also share culture and are twin bastions of the democratic values that prioritize local affairs, Tainan Mayor William Lai (賴清德) said.
Lai said he hoped both municipalities would work together and hold at least one signature cultural event and — through the establishment of a systematic and long-term cooperation — reverse what he described as northern Taiwan-centric cultural viewpoints.
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