Situated upon the cape at the entrance of the Port of Kaohsiung, the temple is a traditional Hokkien-style building.There are steep stairs in front of the temple, which are said to test the devotion of the followers.
According to the stone inscription inside the temple, there were 18 Chinese merchants landed ashore at today’s Sizihwan Bay during the ruling of Emperor Kangxi of the Qing Dynasty.They were here for land reclamation but treated as rebels and executed.To commemorate the spirit of the 18 ancestors, the nearby residents collected all the remains of the dead to the temple for worship.This was the origin of the Lords’ Temple.
In the Japanese Occupation, the Japanese excavated the current Sizihwan cave for the reclamation of the Port of Kaohsiung.Construction failures occurred unexpectedly and many died in the accident.The project was not successful until the Japanese government took the suggestion of the locals to worship the eighteen lords for protection.The earliest Eighteen Lords Temple was built on where the current playground of the National Sun Yat-sen University (NSY) is located.The establishment of the NSY University has forced the temple to relocate in 1984 to the current site up the cape.Today the temple is crowded with visitors as the number of night visitors to the Sizihwan Bay is increasing.
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