Dui-chang-zuo: One Temple, Two Masters, Each Building Half

30-second overview: Taiwan's traditional temples have a unique construction system called "dui-chang-zuo": splitting the building along its central axis, assigning the left and right sides to different master craftsmen, each demonstrating their skill and competing. In the 1917 renovation of Dalongdong Baoan Temple, the temple engaged Chen Ying-bin and Kuo Ta for a dui-chang-zuo, working from the front hall, bell and drum towers to the main hall, crossing left and right along the central axis, completed in 1919. The judged loser Kuo Ta left phrases like "A good craftsman doesn't need to patch" on the beams and columns, allowing today's visitors to see the century-old judge-less competition through the column differences between the east bell tower and west drum tower.

Same Temple, Left and Right Are Different

Entering the Sanchuan Hall of Dalongdong Baoan Temple, most people won't immediately notice anything amiss. The temple is symmetrical—this is a basic principle of traditional architecture. But once you walk to the east bell tower and west drum tower and look up to compare the columns on both sides, you'll discover they're not symmetrical at all.¹

This isn't a construction error. During the 1917 renovation, the temple split the building along its central axis, assigning the left and right sides to two different master craftsmen. The east and west sides each formed a complete system, each with their own crew of artisans, their own drawings and techniques.¹ This practice is called "dui-chang-zuo" in Taiwan, also known as "pin-chang."

What Is Dui-chang-zuo

The Ministry of the Interior's "Taiwan Religious Culture Map" explains it thus: in the construction of Taiwan's traditional buildings, due to budget constraints, personal connections, and other factors, the building is divided into left and right sides, each built independently by a different master builder, jointly completing one structure. During a dui-chang-zuo, both master craftsmen rely on their own skills; at a glance the corresponding components on left and right appear similar in size, but closer inspection reveals differences in shape, style, and technique.²

The system's origins are eminently practical. Temples were built through local fundraising; the local leaders, merchants, and gentry who contributed each had their own networks and preferred masters, and no one wanted to be excluded—so they simply divided the zones. For the craftsmen, it was a public technical showcase: build well, and the next temple commission would follow; build poorly, and your name would be etched into local memory. For the temple, competition meant quality—and buzz.

1917 Baoan Temple: Chen Ying-bin and Kuo Ta

In 1917, locals Shen Chu and Cheng Wan-yi raised funds to renovate Baoan Temple at a cost of 32,000 Japanese yen.¹ The temple engaged the renowned Zhangzhou-school masters Chen Ying-bin and Kuo Ta, using the central axis as the boundary, working from the front hall, bell and drum towers to the main hall, crossing left and right in a dui-chang-zuo. During the same period the temple also held a couplet competition, broadly inviting literati from across the island; nine winning works were selected and carved onto the corridor columns of the front and central halls.¹ In the tenth lunar month of 1919, the renovation was completed.¹

The outcome of this dui-chang-zuo, according to official records, was that Kuo Ta was judged the loser.¹ But he didn't quietly pack up his tools. In the half of the temple he was responsible for, he left inscriptions: on the beams and columns, "A good craftsman doesn't need to patch," and also "Fake lion shatters real lion."¹ The former means his own craftsmanship was perfect in one go, needing no patching; the latter targets his opponent's work, meaning no matter how lifelike a fake lion is carved, it cannot surpass a real lion.³

The Eight Immortals theme under the eaves preserves another anecdote. The original design called for inscribing "Eight Immortals Causing Havoc in the East Sea" on the relief. Kuo Ta, who finished first, carved the three characters "Havoc in the East Sea." Chen Ying-bin, finishing later, felt the figure carvings themselves conveyed the scene, so no additional characters were needed. Thus today only the three characters "Havoc in the East Sea" remain.¹ On the same set of eaves, the two men left their differing opinions on "whether to inscribe characters."

Two Major Craftsman Systems: Xidi School and Bin-szu School

Chen Ying-bin belonged to the Zhangzhou system, known as "Bin-szu," and was one of the most important temple master carpenters in Taiwan during the Japanese colonial period. Kuo Ta, his dui-chang-zuo opponent, came from Dadaocheng and was another active master of the same era. Such dui-chang-zuo was not unique to Baoan Temple; it reflected the reality that Taiwan's major temple timber projects were then contested by two major systems.

The other system was the Quanzhou Xidi School. Its representative figure Wang Yi-shun was born in 1861 in Xidi Village, Quanzhou, Fujian. Born poor, he attended only four years of private school, starting as a carpenter's apprentice. Around 1878 he gained fame by undertaking the Huian Qingshan King Temple. By the late Qing he had become the representative master carpenter of the Xidi School; the craftsmen's world had the saying "Xidi Master Yi-shun first, Master Chang-shui second," meaning among Xidi carpenters Master Yi-shun ranked first, Master Chang-shui second.³

In 1916, Wang Yi-shun met Taipei tycoon Ku Hsien-jung while building the Xiamen residence of Huang Pei-song, a military zhuangyuan. In 1919 he was invited to Taiwan to design and build Mengjia Longshan Temple, and over the next twelve years built six major temples: Mengjia Longshan Temple (1919), Nankunshen Daitian Temple (1923), Hsinchu City God Temple (1924), Taipei Confucius Temple (1925), Changhua Nanyao Temple (1926), and Lukang Mazu Temple (1927).³ The National Cultural Memory Bank entry notes that every major temple renovated in Taiwan after WWII was influenced by Mengjia Longshan Temple.³

A Temple's Temporal Layers

What dui-chang-zuo left behind wasn't just two sets of skills, but a building's construction record. Starting in 1914, the temple recorded the quantity and unit price of every procurement in ledgers, writing in Minnan terms like "tau-iu" (soy sauce) and "hoan-a-hue" (matches). These ten-odd ledgers were hidden in the vent window of the Sanchuan Hall's east side gate, only discovered during the 1990 renovation.¹

The architecture itself was also phased. Because funds couldn't be readied all at once, even the temple's important facade might have windows, doors, and beams and columns from different eras—for example, the main gate's windows and beams and columns differ by three years.¹ The use of stone also reveals localization clues: temples built in Taiwan before the Qianlong era mostly used white granite from mainland China, but Baoan Temple used Tong'an bluestone and stone quarried from Guanyin Mountain in northern Taiwan, giving the overall tone a deep, steady quality, and it is regarded as one of the earliest temples to use Taiwanese stone.¹

After the war, Baoan Temple was occupied by over two hundred military dependents' households for eighteen years, only fully vacated in 1966. Starting in 1995, a seven-year restoration was launched, led by Liao Wu-chih, at a cost of NT$260 million. In 2003 it received an Honorable Mention at the UNESCO Asia-Pacific Awards for Cultural Heritage Conservation, and on November 12, 2018 it was designated a national historic site.¹ The murals on the main hall's exterior corridor walls are by Pan Li-shui; the cochine ware (Koji pottery) on the interior hall walls is by Hung Kun-fu; the dragon-tiger brackets are preserved intact and bear signatures.¹

Why This System Disappeared

Dui-chang-zuo could exist because it relied on an entire craftsman system: apprenticeship, orally transmitted drawings, local gentry networks, and the premise that "a temple is a project jointly funded by a locality." Modern public works replaced this structure. Design goes to architects, construction to contractors, quality control to supervising engineers; procurement speaks of turnkey contracts and responsibility interfaces—a temple could never again be split along its central axis and given to two companies to each build half.

This doesn't mean the skills disappeared, but the mode of displaying them did. Today's temple restoration can designate master craftsmen and require traditional techniques, but no system lets two masters directly compete on the same building, and no spot lets the loser carve their resentment into the beams for visitors a hundred years later to discover.

Further Reading:

• Dalongdong — Three eras on the same axis: Baoan Temple, Confucius Temple, and the Grand Hotel
• Taiwan Architecture — The overall context from indigenous slate houses to contemporary public architecture
• Taiwan Traditional Crafts and Intangible Cultural Heritage — Comprehensive introduction to master crafts and the Living National Treasure system

References