I thought I was imagining things. We were just about finished with a temple dedicated to Fuxi when I saw a score of oldish people hustling into the temple, orange sashes tied around their waist, all speaking Taiwanese, a language related to Mandarin about as closely as French is to Portuguese. I was only able to pick up bits of what they said, despite my forty hours of trying to learn Taiwanese.

Taiwanese Worshipers

This was strange for several reasons. First, most people who speak Taiwanese do not like China, so it is surprising to see them in China at all. Second, it was particularly surprising for them to be at this particular temple, Fuxi being the celebrated mythical ancestor of the Chinese race, just when Taiwanese people seem to be moving further away from being identified as Chinese.

Preparing for Worship

I tried to pick off members of the group to talk to them, but they did not want to talk with me. They told me they were there to worship and that they were from Taoyuan, a suburb of Taipei, but they were willing to say little else.

Writing Prayers

I wandered around, stumped, for several minutes before I was able to pump some information from their tour guide. He said they were a group of Taiwanese Daoists and that they had come here because they looked upon Fuxi as the founder of Daoism (not true, but it is a religious belief).

Talking with the guide

The tour guide thought his Taiwanese tourists were strange, a little backwards. He had taken them all around the area to worship at sites connected to Fuxi and his sister/wife, the Chinese mother goddess Nuwa. Nuwa’s birthplace was located one hundred and forty kilometers away from the city Tianshui, in a cave deep inside a canyon. He took them to the cave but decided not to go into the cave. He did not believe in that stuff.

Temple

None of the mainland Chinese do, he claimed. The Taiwanese did not experience the Cultural Revolution, the period between 1966 to 1976 when an ideological civil war broke out within China’s Communist Party and all efforts were made to destroy religion in China. So, unlike the Taiwanese, the tour guide did not think of Fuxi and Nuwa as religious figures. As I mentioned in the earlier post on Fuxi Temple, this tour guide did suggest that he believed Fuxi and Nuwa were the progenitors of all the people who make up the modern Chinese nation, historical but not religious figures.

Worshipping

To believe that these figures are historical is more problematic than believing in these figures as religious figures. I can respect someone else’s view of religion; that is just what they believe. But it is much harder to do with history. History is a truth we all have to agree on. Do the Chinese expect me, an American of European descent, to really believe that I owe Fuxi a debt of gratitude because he was supposedly the guy to introduce the system of marriage, as this tour guide said he believed?

Fuxi Temple

But, this is what China is becoming. A country without religion, but a strong, almost irrational belief that its mythology is history.

Selfie with the Ancients

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