Dazhongye and the Shrines

In mid-Qing Taiwan, whether walking the winding alleys of Tainan prefecture or the dusty plains of Zhanghua and Chiayi, one often comes across small, unassuming shrines tucked beneath banyan trees or beside abandoned burial grounds far from any village. They lack the grand swallowtail roof ridges or ornate carved beams of major temples; their red-brick walls bear only a stone tablet inscribed with "Dazhongye" (Lord of the Multitude) or "Wanshan Tonggui" (Ten Thousand Souls Returning Together).

These are not the temples of well-known deities, but the "yin temples" that shelter unclaimed wandering spirits. Pull back the veil of history, however, and the spiritual roots of these constantly-tended shrines trace back more than a century — to the apocalyptic tragedy at the end of the Dutch period, the Guo Huaiyi Incident, and the century of echoes and reflection it left in mid-Qing immigrant society.

The story's hidden origin lies in 1652. Taiwan then was ruled by the Dutch East India Company, and Han migrants — crushed by harsh exploitation, oppressive head taxes, and extreme class hierarchy — were a powder keg of accumulated rage. Han leader Guo Huaiyi could no longer bear seeing his countrymen treated as slaves, and raised the banner of rebellion near Chikan in Tainan, vowing to overthrow the "red-haired barbarians." But the peasant uprising met an extraordinarily cruel end. The Dutch allied with thousands of indigenous (Pingpu) warriors and unleashed a campaign of extermination. It was a one-sided slaughter. Han farmers wielding hoes and machetes faced Dutch flintlocks and indigenous spears. Within days the uprising was crushed in blood, Guo Huaiyi was killed, and of the roughly twenty thousand Han migrants in Taiwan at the time, between four and five thousand were massacred. Corpses piled high, the streams near Chikan ran red, and the stench lingered for months. These migrants who had come seeking survival in a foreign land never saw a harvest — they became the unclaimed bones in the wilderness, picked apart by wild dogs.

After Zheng Chenggong drove out the Dutch and Shi Lang's 1683 conquest formally brought Taiwan into the Qing Empire, the island entered more than two centuries of Qing rule. But history was not made gentler by changing regimes. The early Qing court imposed the strict "crossing prohibition" that barred migrants from bringing families, leaving Taiwan's society overwhelmed with wifeless, childless, propertyless single men — the famous "Luohanjiao," or "Arhat-feet."

By the mid-Qing, the western plains were saturated, and competition for survival turned vicious. These men, unmoored from family and consumed by frustration, channeled their fury into extreme violence under the catalyst of official corruption. Taiwan descended into chronic chaos — endless Zhangzhou-Quanzhou feuds (Zhangzhou and Quanzhou Han slaughtering each other), Hokkien-Hakka feuds (Hokkien Han battling Hakka), and Han-indigenous clashes over hunting grounds.

In that mid-Qing era of "small revolts every three years and great upheavals every five," Taiwan became a vast grinder. One day Zhangzhou men burned a Quanzhou village; the next, Hakka men took Hokkien heads. Each feud left fields and ditches strewn with broken corpses. Like the victims of the Guo Huaiyi Incident, many of the dead had no kin in the world — no descendants to bury or mourn them.

In traditional Han belief, the souls of those without descendants to make offerings became starving, vengeful "wandering ghosts" (ligui) who would bring plague, famine, and misfortune to a region. Faced with countless unsolved deaths and unnamed bones, the survivors carried a vast collective trauma and fear. They began to ask: from the Guo Huaiyi Incident in the Dutch era to the ancestral feuds of their own day, was this island doomed to sink eternally into seas of blood?

To pacify these violently dead spirits, and to ease the guilt and dread of the living, mid-Qing immigrant society developed a uniquely inclusive culture of yin worship.

In Tainan, Zhanghua, and Taipei alike, local people and merchants began to organize on their own. Carrying baskets and hoes, they walked across the wildernesses and dry creek beds where feuds had been fought, gathering the white bones bleached in the sun. While collecting these remains, they could not tell whether each bone had belonged to a Zhangzhou man, a Quanzhou man, a Hakka, or an indigenous person. Before death, all ethnic hatreds dissolved. They were simply souls who had fallen on this island in the struggle to survive.

People cleansed the commingled bones and buried them together in great collective tombs. Before each tomb they built a small shrine, inscribing on its stone tablet the four characters "Wanshan Tonggui" (Ten Thousand Souls Returning Together). These four characters held the deepest insight Taiwan's migrants drew from their history: no matter how viciously we hacked at each other in life for ancestral loyalties and selfish gain, in death our ashes mix together inseparably — returning to nothingness, and to this earth, as one.

As for the nameless heroes who died in uprisings, in resistance against officials, or defending their homes, local people honored them as "Dazhongye" (Lord of the Multitude) or "Shenggongma." Communities held grand pudu rituals on a regular schedule, offering rich food and wine to these wandering souls. In psychological terms, this was a subtle defensive mechanism — by ritually transforming "vengeful ghosts" into "deities," the living no longer feared retaliation, and instead, through collective worship, forged communal identity. In a frontier society without order, a moral and emotional order was built outside of institutions.

Today, when we walk the streets and alleys of Taiwan and see the small shrines of Wanshan Tonggui, Youyinggong, or Dazhongye, the curling incense smoke is a historical umbilical cord stretching back centuries.

It records the tragic resistance of Guo Huaiyi and his four thousand countrymen in the Dutch era; it records the bloody struggles of countless Luohanjiao caught in ancestral feuds during the mid-Qing. These yin temples are Taiwan's own "monuments to collective trauma."

They tell later generations that Taiwan's prosperity today was built, inch by inch, by countless lives that lost in history's cracks — lives whose names were never even recorded. The flesh and bones of those nameless people leveled the ground beneath us. After blood and conflict, the ancestors finally chose the compassion of "Ten Thousand Souls Returning Together" to find reconciliation and peace for this turbulent island.