The Temple the Street Was Built Around

The temple's date is unusually precise for a building of its age. The Tianhou Palace was begun in 1326, in the first year of the Tai Ding era of the Yuan, rebuilt in 1403 under the Ming Yongle era, and renamed Tianhou Palace in 1684, the twenty-third year of Kangxi. The renaming matters because it tracks a promotion: Mazu was honoured with the title Tianhou, empress of heaven, and a temple's name changed with the rank of the goddess it served. The compound occupies 5,280 square metres of ground with 1,341 square metres of floor space, and it faces east rather than south, toward the river that brought the worshippers who paid for it.

Mazu temples are ranked, and this one is ranked high. Together with the Meizhou Mazu Temple in Putian, Fujian and the Beigang Chaotian Temple in Yunlin, Taiwan, the Tianjin temple is counted as one of the world's three great Mazu temples. That is a claim about the geography of a sea goddess: Putian is her birthplace, Beigang is her largest following on the island, and Tianjin is her northern anchor at the point where the Grand Canal met the sea, the place where boatmen arrived after a long and uncertain passage. Two banner poles, 25 and 26 metres high, stand before the mountain gate, the kind of marker that could be seen from the water.

The temple lost most of its front in the twentieth century and got it back in the 1980s. In the Cultural Revolution the front hall, the archway and the theatre were demolished. In 1985 the municipal government moved residents out, repaired the fabric and restored the statues of Mazu, Wang Lingguan and the guardian figures, and on New Year's Day 1986 the temple reopened as the Tianjin Folk Customs Museum, the city's first professional museum of folk customs. A new museum building of more than 3,500 square metres was raised on the south-west side in 2005. Since 2016 the temple has also been treated as a living site of worship with a social and charitable role, not only as an exhibit.