By Chris Scott
Photography by Chris Scott

The assignment was fairly straightforward: get some photos to accompany a story on the Tang-ki, a religious group who express their devotion through self-flagellation. A Taiwanese friend of mine filled me in, saying that the Tang-ki believed that if they were pious enough, they could not feel the pain. He also mentioned that many of the Tang-ki were gangsters in their spare time, and when two different groups of them ended up at the same temple, it would spark intense rivalry to the point where they would occasionally give each other a helping hand with the bloodletting.

“The Nankunshen Temple is about 700 meters past the intersection of the 171 on the 17,” said the e-mail from Salvatore. “It’s fucking massive. Parking lot’s like a football field. You can’t miss it.” He left me Pawl’s number and a final bit of advice, “It all goes down before 10am, so you probably want to be there by 7:30 or 8.”

Simple enough. First thing is to contact Pawl and arrange a time to meet. For a guy who doesn’t concern himself too much with the technical minutiae of photography, he takes beautiful pictures. Shooting with him is always a learning experience. However, he wasn’t concerning himself too much with his telephone this time, so a solo trip seemed likely. Let’s see… a 7:30 a.m. arrival would be a 6:30 departure, add in time for breakfast and gearing up and a chat with Dane in Tallahassee. My alarm was set for 4:30 a.m. and the sheets saw me early, having given up a coveted Saturday night on the town. Think of all those girls I could have talked to.

I woke up sharply to the alarm ringing at 6:30, having hit the snooze button twelve times. No time to eat, call Dane, or download the Xpat release party pictures from the camera. Five minutes later the elevator spat me out bleary-eyed into the chilly morning. An hour after that saw my arrival at the given address. A slight problem presented itself at this point. There was no temple. I kept going. 700 meters rolled into 1700 and still no sign of the place. Finally, in the distance a roof came into view. Pulling up at the entrance I ran through the list. Massive temple? Check. Parking lot like a football field? Check. 700 meters past the 171? Well, more like four kilometres, but when do we ever get it all right? I had arrived.

In the immortal words of somebody famous, “The place was dead as Heaven on a Saturday night.” No Tang-ki, no worshippers, hardly any staff even. Snooping around, I found it was indeed a huge temple —so big it had its own ATM, but in fact was more like one new big temple surrounding a very old temple; decades of incense blackened every post, beam and wall. Crossing the threshold was like stepping back into night. Daylight absorbed into the inky darkness of the soot-stained interior.

An hour passed and still few signs of life. The office staff said that everything would begin around ten, still more than an hour away. Peeved by all the debauchery forfeited to be here at this unreasonable hour, I picked up a notebook from 7-11 to scribble a nasty letter to our illustrious Dictator-in-Chief about his “intelligence failures”.

Sitting down on the riverbank with a greasy bag of chips and a pen oozing with venom, my tirade was about to begin when a long string of buses interrupted me. Could these hold the elusive Tang-ki? Soon the parking lot was near full of buses and cars and scooters and a veritable parade of strangely dressed and strangely prancing worshippers. Some dressed like gods and demons, others carried swords, while still others performed beautifully fluid martial arts demonstrations – on stilts. As if on cue, Pawl appeared out of thin air behind me, camera in each hand, looking like he’d just won the lottery.

It was a photographer’s feast, but with very difficult shooting conditions. Dark, moving subjects plus strong backlighting equals a camera filled with hundreds of crap photos. I was also without my beloved 28/200mm lens, which sustained damage on a previous Xpat assignment, and was left juggling an 18/55mm lens —not nearly enough zoom, and a 90/300 —too much zoom.

Braving the din once more, I followed them back into the temple, shooting all the while as the blood began to flow. The other two were equipped with what looked like a large inverted pin-cushion on a string and a diminutive baseball bat bristling with spikes. Suddenly the shutter refused to fire; my memory card was full. This is not the first time since going digital that my carelessness left me standing in the middle of the action like some soldier, bullet-less, in a raging battle desperately searching the camera for some junk photos to get rid of.

The situation looked grim until I stumbled upon a bunch of snaps of Matt giving his speech at the release party. They freed up enough space for a final couple of frames as this unique ritual drew to a close.

The return journey to Tainan through the warming air left me exhausted, but happy, having survived yet another Xpat assignment with my sanity intact (but maybe not my hearing), and pondering the strangeness of religion.