Role
The 18 Lords Temple is an integral icon of the marginal population of Taiwan. The three most relevant underground industries to the 18 Lords Temple are deep-sea fishing, gambling, and sex-work (Festa, 18). Outside of the state-run lotteries, gambling is prohibited in Taiwan. Sex-work is illegal. The Taiwanese government recognizes that 460,000 of their 23,000,000 citizens are problematic gamblers. Problematic gamblers are men and women whose addiction disrupts many aspects of their livelihood by continuously putting their financial security at risk (Chung). Gambling winnings are defined as ill-gotten gains in Taiwan and greater China. The influence of these subcultures drove the 18 Lords Temple to become the most popular place to supplicate divinities for reward and help with concerns that are traditionally seen as amoral.
The 18 Lords Temple is designed for the worship of seventeen dead people and one dog. It offers the opportunity of supernatural intervention for requests that would not be recognized at other temple complexes. The 18 Lords are believed to be attentive to supplicants no matter the request. They are ambivalent, showing no partiality to moral or immoral requests. This idea draws underground people to them, similar the worship of Zhu Bajie by prostitutes in Taiwan (Brose). If they are provided with worship, through various material offerings, touch, or speech and vocal performance, they are understood to address the client’s needs. The temple serves as a place where men and women who exist outside of normal social constructions can perform religious activity, which establishes community and identity.
Connections to Society and Culture
Entertainment media has been made surrounding the figures of the 18 Lords since the 1960’s. The most popular representations are the 1985 movie The Eighteen Lords and a 1985 soap opera The Strange Tale of the Eighteen Lords. The movie presents the ghosts as shady figures who do not refuse any requests. The plot focuses on gambling and prostitution. In summary, a prostitute who has been tricked into debt bondage worships the Eighteen Lords to free her from her situation. She meets two men, A-kai and Ban-ji, and becomes romantically involved with A-kai, who vows that he will win enough money gambling to pay her debt off. The men consult the Eighteen Lords who reveal a book with remedies for success in gambling. At the instruction of the book, Ban-Jie rips the umbilical cord out of his newborn daughter, killing her, and fashions a talisman out of it. Wearing the talisman, Ban-jie wins enough money for A-kai to buy the prostitute and repay the 18 Lords at their temple in gold. This representation connects the Eighteen Lords to poltergeists in other cultures, like Rumpelstiltskin, who offer material gain in exchange for the life of infants. The soap opera presents the Eighteen Lords in a different fashion. The seventeen humans are depicted as Ming loyalists in a religious brotherhood centered on the worship of Guan Gong. While fighting, they are killed in their boat which sails to Taiwan (Weller 1994, 157-160).
History
The 18 Lords Temple has several origin stories dating back to the 1880s. All accounts surround the figure of a mysterious stray dog was found with 17 dead bodies. The unsuspecting pedestrians who approach the scene proceed to dig a mass grave for the dead. As the good neighbors finished burying the bodies, the dog is reported to have jumped into the grave, sealing its fate in the strangest of circumstances. The locals who witnessed the event believed the dog’s action to be an example of unwavering loyalty to its owner and decided to memorialize the gravesite by establishing a small shrine there.
The site has undergone significant visual and social transformations since its inception. After existing relatively unknown for decades, the 18 Lords Temple gained a large uptick in devotional religious activity after an event in the 1960s. The small shrine was assigned to be demolished to make way for a nuclear plant, but the demolition crew experienced an unignorable number of difficulties in clearing the site. When local citizens learned about the disturbances and technical malfunctions the crew had faced, they assembled to protect the shrine. This event is one of the few instances where the Taiwanese government conceded its plans due to citizens gathering in collective defiance. After the local community won, they pressured the state to construct a prominent temple complex on the gravesite. The 18 Lords Temple is the largest and most popular religious site dedicated to a ghost spirit, the dog, but the ghost worshipping aspect was not abnormal in Taiwan at that time or currently.
The 1980’s saw another significant rise in religious activity at the temple. A world-wide stock market boom provided enthusiasm that produced an uptick in devotions and supplications to the dog. It became a place where the people would flock for the prospect of rapid financial gain in illegal lotteries, shady business dealings, gang-related activities, and a multitude of other immoral gratifications (Weller 1995, 116-119).
The traditional categories for divinities and spirits in China are ancestors, ghosts, and gods (Wolf). The 18 Lords are classified as ghosts. Along with their popular representation as ghosts, they are also presented as ancestors. A free booklet available to guests at the temple offers a name and a background to each individual lord. The backstories of the lords carry traditional motifs found in ancestor historiographies. They display the lords as virtuous role models. The name given for the dog is the Black Dragon (Weller 1994, 164). The temple, like many others in Taiwan, acts as a business. Everything at the temple, besides the booklet mentioned above, costs money.
Imagery
The most prominent feature of the temple is the grave mound, which has two grandiose bronze dog statues, which are aggressively pet and rubbed for a variety of purposes. People will come to rub jewelry and other items believed to conduct spiritual energies for winning numbers and luck. There is an altar in front of the dog statues where supplicants will offer cigarettes as incense. This activity is very different from what would be found at the altar of other deities in Taiwan. The worship and offerings to the 18 Lords reveal that they exist outside of traditional pantheons, and their deity evades interpretation (Weller 1995).
Bibliography
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Chung, Cheng-Wei, et al. “Taiwanese Gambling Behaviors, Perceptions, and Attitudes.” American Journal of Industrial and Business Management, vol. 03, no. 01, 2013, pp. 110–120, https://doi.org/10.4236/ajibm.2013.31014.
Festa, Paul. “Manly Vice and Virtù: State Specters, Secular Rituals, and Public Culture in Taiwan.” PhD dissertation, Cornell University, 2005.
Sitnikov, Igor. “Common Symbols in Eurasia-Pacific Unconscious Cultural Heritage: A Case Study of the Taiwanese 18 Deities’ Cult.” International Journal of Asia Pacific Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, 1 Jan. 2011, pp. 47–74.
Weller, Robert P. “Matricidal Magistrates and Gambling Gods: Weak States and Strong Spirits in China.” The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, no. 33, Jan. 1995, pp. 107–124, https://doi.org/10.2307/2950090. Accessed 8 Jan. 2021.
Weller, Robert P. Resistance, Chaos and Control in China: Taiping Rebels, Taiwanese Ghosts and Tiananmen. University of Washington Press, 1994.
Wolf, Arthur P. “Gods, Ghosts, and Ancestors.” In Religion and Ritual in Chinese Society, Stanford University Press, 1974, pp. 131–82, 356–57, https://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/document?id=ad05-019.
Asian Religions at UTK 