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or a boil on her chest which other doctors had been unable to cure. The story adds that he was required to pass a test before he would be allowed to approach the empress. He was offered a silken thread which had been tied to a column in the hall [or on the knob of a door] but behind a screen and was then asked to take the empress's pulse. It was the custom to take the pulse of ladies by remote means using a piece of thread tied to the wrist. Wu correctly diagnosed that the thread was tied to a column [by the pulse of the dragon in the stone] and not the empress's wrist as he had been told it was. They next tied the silk to the paw of a kitten and again Wu was able to identify the pulse as non-human, and it was only then that he was allowed to treat the empress. Having cured her illness the emperor asked what reward Wu would like and, so legend claims, he requested an old set of the emperor's cast off clothes. After his death Wu was deified by the emperor as Pao-sheng Ta-ti, alluding, so it is said, to him being dressed in the emperor's cast off robes. A caretaker at his cult centre added that as Wu wore the emperor's clothes in life and was buried in them he had command over minor deities and even some of the major ones such as Lei Kung, the god of thunder.
A strange tale recounted by a temple keeper in Jakarta claimed that Pao-sheng Ta-ti appeared to a Sung emperor in a dream and informed him that he, Pao-sheng Ta-ti, was an incarnation of the Yellow Emperor [Huang Ti] and bore the same surname as the emperor of the Sung, Chao. Therefore, so the story concluded, Pao-sheng Ta-ti was regarded as the imperial ancestor and his special protective deity.
His cult, first established at the Lung-chiu An, a monastery not far from Amoy, and later at the Tzu-chi Kung in Lung-hai [Pai-chiao], was carried by immigrants through the ports of T'ung-an, Amoy and Hai-ch'eng to the southern seas. The oldest image of Pao-sheng Ta-ti in Taiwan is probably in Hsueh-chia in Tainan county where it is said to have been brought over to Taiwan from the mainland by Koxinga.
Some indication of his popularity as a doctor deity in Taiwan is manifest by his presence as the major deity in at least 160 temples on the island, dedicated to him, predominantly in the areas of Tainan and Yunlin, with a great many more as the main deity on a side altar of other temples. A noticeable increase in shrines dedicated to him occurred after the great plague swept Taiwan in 1699 killing large numbers of new immigrants. It was believed that an image of Pao-sheng Ta-ti brought over from Fukien,