The Summer Temple Fair | Sinnan 12 — The Doctor's House That Plays a Pastry Shop

Aunt Hsia Tien-ching's cake shop, Chien Yueh Zhai, is where 神之鄉 puts the parts of family life that happen away from the temple. The kitchen scenes in episode four, where Yeh Yun and Tien-lung quietly finish the coming-of-age rite for a sixteen-year-old who is not there to see it. The soup in episode five. All of it filmed in a hundred-year-old shophouse on Zhongshan Road. It was never a bakery. This was the home and clinic of Fu Zu-jian, one of Daxi's senior physicians, and the building still knows it — three bays deep, with room proportions and joinery noticeably finer than anything on the tourist strip two hundred metres north. There is a reason for that. Zhongshan Road used to be Xinnan Street, where the money lived. Heping Road below it was the trading street, and the lanes behind were where the labourers were. Daxi's class map is still legible in its ceiling heights. The facade is a three-arched Baroque parapet in washed-aggregate render, with paired columns and a plaque naming the house. Behind it now: an independent bookshop, a café, and local craft goods spread across the three depths of the building, so you move front to back through what used to be waiting room, consulting room and family quarters. Open Wednesday to Sunday, eleven to six, closed Mondays and Tuesdays. Free to walk in. Go to the back room and look at the photographs on the wall — the family of the doctor who lived here, hung by people who took the trouble to find them. A production borrowed this house to invent a family. The house already had one. Location data: Taoyuan City tourism and the Daxi cultural resources archive, which records the building as part of the Yanju compound at Zhongshan Road 10, 12 and 12-1. Photo courtesy of Taoyuan City Government tourism.