**Lunar New Year Temple Traditions in Taiwan: Seeking Blessings, Fortune, and Protection**
As the Lunar New Year holidays kick off, people in Taiwan flock to temples, seeking a good year ahead. There are many reasons to go and many things to pray for. For some, it's about more than simple blessings: there’s cash at stake, too.
At exactly midnight on New Year’s Day, worshipers rush past each other into central Taiwan’s Fu-hsing Temple. They’re racing to be the one to offer the gods the first incense stick of the year. In just seconds, we have a winner—and it’s a comeback kid, too.
This is my third time taking part.
I missed it by a tenth of a second last year.
But I won one other time 13 years ago.
He’s won a commemorative plaque, plus about $300 US dollars.
But there are plenty of consolation prizes, too. The temple’s stuffed nearly 10,000 festive red envelopes with 1 US dollar bills—each to go to visitors during the New Year season.
Many temples handing out cash keep it simpler. Wude Temple, also in central Taiwan, is typical, offering small coins or symbolic tokens meant as seeds, from which money is meant to grow through the year. Long lines form to get one: but here, too, there’s a real chance at riches. Anyone might be a winner.
We’ve put 300 gold coins [randomly]
into 200,000 envelopes of “seed money.”
But while there is a focus on cash and getting rich at this time of year, money's far from the only reason to visit a temple. People ask for divine protection and for things to go their way. And amid deep shifts in Taiwan's society, there are signs it’s no longer just about praying for human wellbeing.
Even in the weeks leading up to the holiday, pet owners have been gathering at this pet-exclusive temple to pray for their animal companions in the year ahead.
Dogs and cats take part in human rituals supposed to show what the gods say is in store. This temple only opened two months ago. But it’s already busy, and its founder knows why.
Taiwan's declining birth rate ranks among the top [in the world]
so many people here have shifted the devotion
they would have given to the next generation onto their pets
treating them as their own children.
I feel the role of a pet temple
is truly about how to embrace this love and devotion
providing a space where everyone feels
that the deities will look after their “children”.
Looking around at the people here, it seems the temple’s hit on something real in the culture.
[For his New Year wish] I don't ask for much.
I just hope they stay healthy.
Mainly, I hope they can stay healthy
and be with us for a long, long time
without any major illnesses or pain.
As the Lunar New Year season opens, there will be plenty of other chances to pray and seek a better Year of the Horse—and many will take advantage of them. Because as an often-heard phrase in Taiwan goes—“if you worship, you’ll be protected.”
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