The 1930s Taiwan Folk-Belief Surveys of Wang Shih-ch’ing

Record summary

Taiwanese folklore surveys produced during Japanese rule recorded temple cults, local deities, ghost stories, spirit mediums, protective talismans, and rites against affliction. These collections matter for apocryphal-account research because they preserve named beings and ritual contexts rather than isolated modern paranormal anecdotes. They also document how folklore was edited for colonial knowledge-making and later nationalist or scholarly purposes. The broad survey tradition is verifiable, but the attribution and publication history of individual compilers or volumes should be checked in Taiwanese library catalogues before treating a reported spirit narrative as a contemporaneous record.