Deified Outsiders in Taiwan

Across Taiwan, communities have occasionally enshrined outsiders and folded them into the local pantheon. Folk religion holds that those who die far from home or by violence may linger as restless spirits; a foreigner who proves efficacious can be appeased and, in time, promoted from ghost to god. The result is a small but striking assortment of temples and shrines to deified outsiders, most prominently Japanese policemen, soldiers, and airmen of the colonial era, with isolated cases reaching back to the European colonial period. Veneration of this kind is less an endorsement of the figure’s life or values than a way of creating peace in the local community.