Zhinan Temple

A friend in Taipei told us the legend with a completely straight face: Lü Dongbin, the immortal enshrined at Zhinan Temple, was jilted by a woman before ascending to godhood, and has held a grudge against courting couples ever since. Bring your partner up the mountain, the story goes, and he might just find a reason to separate you. Lia found this an irresistible reason to climb a thousand stone steps on a Tuesday morning.

A Thousand Steps, Roughly Counted

The climb begins gently, a paved path winding through betel palm groves on the lower slopes of Mount Wufeng, before narrowing into the famous stone stairway that gives the temple its reputation — steep, uneven in places from decades of wear, shaded for most of the ascent by dense forest canopy that keeps the worst of the humidity at bay. We stopped twice, not from superstition but from the genuinely punishing gradient, catching our breath beside elderly worshippers who passed us without apparent effort, walking sticks in hand, clearly making this climb as a matter of weekly routine.

Along the way, smaller shrines and rest pavilions punctuate the climb, one selling cold barley tea from a cart that had clearly been positioned there for exactly this purpose, at exactly the point where most people’s legs start to protest.

The View That Justifies the Legend

The temple complex itself spreads across several terraces cut into the hillside, its main pavilion dedicated to Lü Dongbin flanked by shrines to Confucius and the Buddha in a layout that captures Taiwan’s genuinely fluid approach to religious boundaries — Taoist, Confucian, and Buddhist worship coexisting on the same hill without apparent friction. From the uppermost terrace, the Taipei basin opens out below in full: the Xindian and Jingmei rivers threading through the city, Taipei 101 visible as a small silver needle in the haze on a clear day.

We lit incense at the main hall more out of respect for the ritual than conviction, and made our way back down by the cable car that now connects the temple to Maokong — a considerably faster, if less earned, descent than the one we had climbed up.

When to go: Weekday mornings avoid both the crowds of pilgrims that fill the temple on lunar calendar festival days and the worst of the midday heat on the exposed upper steps. Autumn brings the clearest views of the city below.