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This article takes the lawsuit between Pu-An-Tang(普安堂) and Ci-You temple(慈祐宮) for the land ownership of Mazutian(媽祖田) in Tucheng(土城) as an example to study the Taiwanese “Szutian”(祀田). Szutian means the land of the temple, is the land that believers maintain to operate the temple and donate or raise funds. During the Qing period, there were two types owners in Taiwan — the official one and unofficial landowner. The former is named “Yehu”(業戶), the latter is named “Yezhu”(業主). The yezhu of the szutian may include the descendants of the donators who donated the lands, the God in the temples, and the tenants who conclude the copping contract with the temple. It caused multi-owners status for one property. In addition, due to the fact that most portion of Ci-You temple Mazutian is still in the mountain area, this article also discusses about land ownership in Taiwan in Qing period.
During the Japanese period, residents of the Mazutian mountain area avoided the high taxation of the “Taiwan Land Tax Rule”(臺灣地租規則) in 1904, and abandoned to register as the landowners of Mazutian mountain area. However, this did not mean that residents denied themselves as landowners. The reason was that the residents’ perception of the “owner” still remained in the concept of “multi-ownership” during the Qing period. Therefore, even if the residents made register the Ci-You temple as the official certificated owner on the government record, they still thought that both of them were landowners. They ignored the difference between Traditional Custom and Modern Law.
And this practice sowed for the disputes over the land ownership between two parties in the future.
In post-world war Ⅱ the Kuomintang (KMT) regime jointed Taiwan and immediately carried out the Cadastral Clearance and the general registration of land. However, the process was extremely rushed and chaotic. Therefore, the contents of most registration were transcribed from official documents in Japanese period. The inconsistency of unsettled ownership-disputes between the official and unofficial owners’ can not be solved. In 1953, the government legislated “Land-to-the-Tiller” program(耕者有其田政策), and most of the fields in Mazutian were transferred to tenants. Awing to the fact that part of the mountain land was not expropriated by the government, the certain part of the land price was too high, the residents could not afford it but gave up the right , so Ci-You temple still holds nearly 2.97 million square meter fields in the mountain area today.
The land ownership lawsuit took place in 2006 and pushed the land ownership conflict between Ci-You temple and mountain residents to the highest point. Although the Ci-You temple won the lawsuit. But for Pu-An-Tang and other mountain residents, the sentence does not reflect justice. |