Longtian Village, where Kunci Temple stands, occupies a stretch of flat land along the Beinan River in Luye Township. At the start of Japanese colonial rule over Taiwan, the area was largely unpopulated — a riverside plain that the colonial administration identified as suitable agricultural land. In 1912, a newly established company acquired a tract of this land as part of the government's "immigration village" program, with plans to plant sugarcane. Families from Niigata Prefecture in Japan were persuaded to relocate here, establishing the settlement that would become Longtian. What arrived as a colonial plantation village became, in time, a real community — with the social and spiritual structures that communities inevitably develop.

Inside the new Japanese settlement, a Shinto shrine was built on October 17, 1923. It was dedicated to Prince Yoshihisa and served the spiritual needs of the Japanese immigrant community through the colonial decades. On November 13, 1931, the shrine was relocated to the current grounds of what is now Kunci Temple. When Japan's administration ended in 1945 and the Japanese settlers departed, Han Chinese families who had been living nearby moved into Longtian. They brought with them the Tudigong — the earth god venerated in Chinese folk religion — and installed him in the old Shinto shrine building. The sacred space shifted hands without being destroyed. What had been a Shinto structure became a Taoist and folk religion temple, layering one tradition onto the architecture of another.

Today, Kunci Temple's grounds contain something unusual: a reconstructed Shinto shrine known as Luye Shrine (鹿野神社). The original shrine structure, adapted and absorbed into the temple complex after 1945, was eventually reconstructed through a Taiwan-Japan cooperative effort completed in 2015. This pairing — a working Taoist temple and a reconstructed Shinto shrine on the same grounds — is a compressed architectural history of the twentieth century in rural Taiwan. Colonial-era Japanese religious practice, displaced and transformed, has been restored not as a living faith but as a historical marker, standing alongside the Taoist rituals that replaced it. Visitors move between the two structures and read the same land through two different spiritual vocabularies.

Outside the main temple building grows an eighty-year-old chinaberry tree, roughly 20 meters tall — more than twice the expected height for its species. The tree predates many of the temple's current structures. Its size alone would make it a landmark, but it carries additional significance because of the months Cheng Yen spent at Kunci Temple in 1960, early in her life as a nun, when she would gather with other monastics beneath its branches for Dharma discussions. Cheng Yen went on to establish the Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu Chi Foundation, which grew into one of Taiwan's most influential humanitarian organizations. For Tzu Chi adherents, the tree at Kunci Temple is a pilgrimage point — a living thing that was present at the beginning of something larger. The chinaberry does not know this, presumably. But it keeps growing.