九宛祠／カウワン祠

Locations

February 9th, 2024

Established in March 1938, Kauwan Shinto Shrine¹ (九宛祠) is one of dozens of former Shinto sites scattered across eastern Taiwan. These shrines were part of a widespread program to assimilate Taiwanese Indigenous people into the Japanese Empire. Most such shrines were dismantled after the war, and many are no lost in the undergrowth or otherwise not readily accessible, but this one is only a short hike from the nearby Jingmei Public Elementary School (景美國民小學) in Xiulin, an Indigenous district in Hualien, Taiwan.

An obscure former Shinto shrine on a hillside in eastern Taiwan.

Newspaper records indicate a local Indigenous leader Piwasaowan (ピワサオワダン) petitioned colonial authorities to construct a shrine in this area in April 1934, but it doesn’t seem as if this request was immediately granted. Four years later this facility was built against the hills at the back of the village, enshrining the Three Pioneering Kami (開拓三神) and Prince Kitashirakawa (北白川宮能久親王), all standard for this sort of small-scale shrine.

Looking up from the visiting path at the entrance to the shrine.

The stone terraces of the shrine are in fairly decent condition despite decades of strong earthquakes and typhoons ravaging this coastline.

The mossy foundation of the main hall, gutted long ago.

An oblique view of the pedestal at the heart of the old Shinto shrine.

This particular site was recognized for its heritage value in 2011 and has since been cleaned up somewhat, exposing the sandō (参道), or visiting path; the original torii; and the base of what would have been the main hall. The location of the shrine, again the mountains behind a school, sheltered it from development, but the original wooden structures have been lost to time.

The name of the shrine derives from Qowgan, literally “big bamboo” in the Truku Indigenous language (太魯閣語). This term has been variously transliterated into Japanese and then Chinese as Jiawan (九宛), Jiawan (加灣), and Kawuwan (卡烏灣) over successive colonial administrations. In modern times it is often referred to as Jiawan Shinto Shrine (加灣神社). ↩