Halfway up Dihua Street, the modest 19th-century Xiahai temple looks unremarkable from the outside — a single-courtyard Taoist shrine in a row of shophouses — but is one of the busiest small temples in Taipei. The City God himself sits at the back; in a side hall, however, is Yue Lao, the Old Man Under the Moon, traditionally the matchmaker god who ties red threads around the ankles of future couples.
The temple is a place of pilgrimage for the unmarried and the lonely. The going rate of devotion is a small offering of fruit, flowers and wedding biscuits, and ten thousand red threads are reputedly handed out as charms each year. Open during the day; the atmosphere is at its most intense on the first and fifteenth of the lunar month.