Lugu Fenghuangshan Temple

Fenghuangshan Temple was built in the Jiaqing era of the Qing dynasty, just as Han settlers were pushing into the Nantou mountains. The pioneering parties carried Cankui Zushi's incense with them, because the three things most feared in the mountains — malaria, wild beasts and losing your way — were, in legend, all his to handle. When the first settlers arrived and found fertile land that looked like home, they built grass huts and stayed, enshrining the incense they had carried with them; that was the temple's earliest form. More than two hundred years on, Lugu has gone from frontier to tea country, and Fenghuangshan Temple is still the center of Cankui Zushi worship in the mountains. Every year on the Patriarch's birthday, the 16th day of the 3rd lunar month, devotees come back from all over to pay their respects, and the mountain roads fill with people.