Centre Guan Di, Terre-Sainte, Saint-Pierre留尼汪特尔桑特关帝中心

Type

Overseas Daoist Temples

Location

France (Réunion) · Réunion (Department) · Terre-Sainte, Saint-Pierre · Heights of Terre-Sainte, town of Saint-Pierre

First built

2017 · A newly built second site for the community of the Saint-Pierre Guandi pagoda.

Overview

The Centre Guan Di at Terre-Sainte was completed in 2017 on the heights of Terre-Sainte in the town of Saint-Pierre, a recently built religious site of Réunion's Chinese community, dedicated principally to Guandi. The building was constructed according to traditional Chinese conventions and the principles of fengshui, with its roof timbers custom-ordered from China and Chinese craftsmen specially engaged to travel to the island to assemble them — this method of construction, in which components are custom-ordered from southern China and craftsmen travel overseas with them, has continued unbroken since the spread of Chinese temples overseas in the nineteenth century, and its persistence into a twenty-first-century building project is an example of the continuity of the overseas Chinese temple-building tradition. The center belongs to the same community system as the 1920 Guandi pagoda in the town of Saint-Pierre, the latter being the historic temple and the former a newly built site for religious and cultural activities. Ethnic Chinese in Réunion today are predominantly Catholic, while practicing the cult of Guandi and ancestor worship in parallel, a pattern similar to the religious parallelism found in Mauritius.

Highlights

• A newly built Guandi site completed in 2017
• Roof timbers custom-ordered from China, assembled by craftsmen who traveled to the island
• Continues the temple-building tradition dating from the nineteenth century
• Belongs to the same community as the 1920 Guandi pagoda in town
• Catholicism practiced in parallel with the cult of Guandi