Guandu Temple

This guide to Guandu Temple opens with an omen: three ancient banyan trees at the gate that died together in a single night in 1895, weeks before Japanese troops landed on the island. It reaches back to the temple's founding around 1661, when a traveling monk carried a golden statue of the sea goddess Mazu here from China, and to the merchants who later built her a proper shrine. Listen for the eighty-meter tunnel bored into the cliffside, lined with carved guardian spirits.