Tenmu Shinto Shrine

The shrine at the heart of Tenmu-kyō (天母教), a syncretic religion founded in 1925 by Nakaji Toshirō (中治稔郎), a retired postal worker who had come to Taiwan in 1902 before becoming a director at the Tainan Post Office by 1921. Tenmu-kyō held that Amaterasu (天照大神) and Mazu (天上聖母) were different manifestations of the same deity, Tenmu, the divine mother, with the central object of worship (御神體) being a Mazu statue brought from Meizhou. In 1931 he was granted permission to develop the hot spring area at Sanjiaopou (三角埔) in Shilin; with the patronage of Japanese department store magnate Eiji Shigeta (重田榮治) the shrine itself was completed in 1933. The influx of worshippers spurred commercial activity; hotels, shops, and a bus station all adopted the name, and the area came to be known as Tianmu (天母). Around the start of the Kōminka movement (皇民化運動), when police enforced the destruction of local deity statues, Nakaji sheltered seven major statues (七仙真祖) by declaring them the Japanese Seven Lucky Gods.

After the war Nakaji returned to Japan and the shrine was destroyed during a road widening projects, but local believers rescued the statues in 1947 and eventually enshrined them in Sanyu Temple (三玉宮), which still stands today. The original temple was located near what is now Zhongshan North Road Sec. 7, Lane 191, No. 22 (中山北路七段191巷22號).