This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
In the 1660s, following the collapse of the Ming dynasty and the rise of the Qing, a large wave of Han Chinese settlers from Fujian province crossed the strait to Taiwan and began building new lives on an island that had, until then, held only a much smaller Chinese presence. They carried their homeland's religious practice with them, Taoism prominent among it, alongside Buddhism and the folk religion that had long run alongside both in Fujian itself.
The settlers built temples as they established themselves, founding a temple culture on Taiwan that continued unbroken from that first wave of migration onward rather than arriving as a later import. This was religious practice carried by ordinary settlers making a new home rather than installed by any ruling authority or missionary effort, taking root through the everyday business of building farms, villages and community life in unfamiliar territory.
What this changed for Taoism's spread was the planting of roots on Taiwan nearly three centuries before the island would become the tradition's principal refuge anywhere in the world. The temple culture the Fujian settlers founded in the 1660s was already well established, generations deep, long before the twentieth century upheavals that would later make Taiwan the largest home Taoism had anywhere outside mainland China itself.