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Government and Business Get Together to Restore Jiying Temple

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Taipei City Government held a ceremony to celebrate the completed restoration of Jingmei’s Jiying Temple on March 9. The Jiying Temple was built during the Tong Tze era of the Qing dynasty. There are over one hundred designated historical relics in Taipei. Due to the limits in the city government’s budget, nearly 90 percent of the funding for the Jiying Temple restoration had to come from the private sector. Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou is grateful for the effort and dedication of the private sector on this project. He thanked the temple’s management committee and members of the local community—the ones who made the restoration project possible. The temple restoration took three years and cost NT$62 million. The city government contributed NT$6.5 million to the project. Jiying Temple honors the deities King Baoyi and Chancellor Baoyi (General Xu Yuan and Zhang Xun), who both fought bravely and died during the Anshi rebellion of the Tang dynasty. The famous Sung Dynasty official Wen Tienxiang mentioned them in his work "Zhengqi ge" (The Song of Moral Sense). The Jiying Temple has long been a center of worship for people in the Jingmei area. The Gao clan were early immigrants from Henan Province who settled in the Jingmei area, and built the temple to honor their divine guardian, King Boayi. Construction on the original temple was completed in Hsien Fong in the first year of the Qing dynasty. In those days, the temple was situated in Jinghu Zhuwei. The temple was relocated to its present location during the Tong Tze period. In 1985, the Ministry of the Interior designated it a Class 3 historical site. Mayor Ma presented a large wooden plaque to the temple’s caretakers. Inscribed upon the plaque is “ju yang chuan hui” (“the symbol passed down from Juyang”), celebrating the restoration of the temple.