Shoppers bought out the entire stock of 1,000 towels bearing a Taoist peace talisman from Tainan’s Puji Temple (普濟殿) three days after they went on sale, temple staff said on Saturday.
The towels, 103cm by 36cm, bear a blown-up replica of the temple’s famous talisman known as the Puji Temple Hundred-Year-Old Charm of Peace and Tranquility (百年平安符).
A spiritual medium for the temple was said to have written the charm in 1911 while under the possession of Chih Fu Wang Yeh (池府王爺), the main deity worshiped at the shrine.
Photo: Wang Shu-hsiu, Taipei Times
The towels were originally made for the Lantern Festival, but after the event was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the temple put them up for sale on its Web site, Puji Temple Historical Association executive director Chiang Wen-cheng (蔣文正) said.
The popularity of the towels was a pleasant surprise to the temple and the association that helped make them, Chiang said.
The design, an accurate reproduction of the original talisman, down to the color of the paper on which it was written, has been printed on other temple merchandise, including document holders and mask bags, but the towel is by far the best-selling item, he said.
The association is working with manufacturers to produce a second run of the towels after the Lunar New Year holiday, he added.
The temple wrote on its Facebook page that several parents bought the towels to swaddle their babies and said the towels had a calming effect on the toddlers.
Although replicas of the peace talisman have been a perennial favorite at the temple’s gift shop, the charm has a broader academic significance, and colonial-era religious studies academic Masuda Fukutaro deemed it a notable artifact of Taiwan’s folk religion culture.
The talisman is in the collection of the National Taiwan University Library and a digital copy is at the National Repository of Cultural Heritage.
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