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come. From a religious viewpoint, Taichung is a rather average and conservative town; there are no very old and large temples of provincial reputation, attracting large crowds of tourists or pilgrims. In that respect, Tainan and Taipei are more famous, and of course so are other old places like Peikang and Lukang, once very flourishing fishermen's settlements but unable to keep up with modernization. Still, their temples keep attracting steady flows of pilgrims from afar.
In recent years the provincial and municipal governments have taken a more active interest in the religious life of the people. This can be seen as a continuation of the old imperial system, when religion was strongly supervised and even controlled by the officials, but the present day practice includes quite a few innovations. One innovation is the requirement that all temples should be legally registered. In municipalities this can be done at the city hall. The administration of the cities includes a department of population (min-tsu pu), which in turn has a sub-department of religious affairs. In 1976 the Taichung city hall printed a list of all the temples duly registered; upon request I obtained a copy. Later on I was allowed to borrow and photocopy a similar list in Tainan, whereas in Kaohsiung no such list had been printed yet: I was permitted to look through the register containing all the filled out registration papers sent in to the city hall by the temples.
I expect that all the major cities in Taiwan (Taipei, Keelung, Taichung, Tainan, Kaohsiung, Yangmingshan) will have such a list by now, and each county or hsien government has started to register all the temples within their own jurisdiction. Copies of all these registers have to be sent to the provincial government. This will hopefully make future temple research much easier: to me and others it has often been a time-consuming and frustrating experience not to find up-to-date temple lists providing the most basic information, especially in a rapidly changing urban environment, where temples are continuously being broken down and rebuilt elsewhere.
The city of Taichung was one of the first to complete a list of the city temples. (Tainan was earlier: my copy dates from 1974.) When I visited the "religious officials" again in the autumn of