The Nationalist Retreat Brings Taoism's Leadership To Taiwan

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

When the government of the Republic of China retreated to Taiwan in 1949 after its final defeat in the Chinese Civil War, it did not travel alone. Several religious leaders fled with it, among them Zhang Enpu, the sixty third Celestial Master of Taoism and hereditary head of the Zhengyi Dao lineage, a line of orthodox leadership stretching back many generations on the mainland before that year.

Zhang Enpu's arrival brought that orthodox leadership and its institutional authority to Taiwan for the first time, giving the island a claim no earlier wave of Chinese settlement, including the Fujian settlers who had brought Taoist practice there centuries before, had ever given it, the seat of Taoism's own hereditary priesthood in exile. On the mainland itself, the Communist government that followed the Nationalist defeat began suppressing organised religious practice, closing off the very ground that leadership had come from and had drawn its authority.

What this changed for Taoism's spread was decisive rather than gradual. With the Celestial Master's own lineage now established on the island and the mainland closed to open religious life for decades to come, Taiwan became, for the rest of the twentieth century, Taoism's principal refuge, home to the largest Taoist population found anywhere outside mainland China itself.