In the winter of 1887, a violent earthquake tore through Shiping County, collapsing the main hall of Tongming Palace and trapping several young students inside the ruins. Rising dust and splintering timber filled the air. The ground had shaken this Daoist temple before. Located at No. 17 Tianjia Lane in Yilong Town, the temple stands on a plot of land once known as the tiger thicket, a place previously untouched by human homes.

It survived through sheer community will. In 1691, a Buddhist nun named Jingfa took charge of the site, personally sculpting a statue of the deity Wang Tianjun and securing agricultural land to fund the temple's daily incense. Decades later, in 1736, a scholar named Yang Junde dreamed of brilliant lights radiating from the upper tower. Inspired by this vision, he and his peers pooled twenty taels of silver to buy a shop, keeping the warm, flickering glow of oil lamps burning through the night. Following the devastating 1887 disaster, local leaders mobilized. In 1888, they raised over 280 taels of silver, replaced broken beams, and restored the traditional Diannan wood-framed structure.

Between 2015 and 2018, government preservation funds reinforced these historic timbers, allowing visitors today to feel the cool touch of the ancient wooden pillars. By 2021, the site reopened as Shiping Wenyuan under a creative revitalization program. Today, the quiet courtyard houses the studios of Taiwanese painter Cai Zhenyuan and calligrapher Cheng Lianfang. Children gather here for youth calligraphy training, filling the halls with the scent of fresh ink where scholars once studied by lamplight, keeping the ancient spirit of the tiger thicket alive.