The Hakka Affairs Council has made multiple errors in an online report about an Yimin temple, former Hsinchu County commissioner Lin Kuang-hua (林光華) said on Friday.
Yimin (義民, righteous people) worship is the veneration of loyalist militiamen who died fighting for the Qing empire against rebels and invaders.
Lin, who recently returned from a Hakka cultural festival in Australia, said that historical inaccuracies on the council’s Web site plagued the introduction of Paojhong Ting, an Yimin temple in Shinpu Township (新埔).
Photo: Huang Mei-chu, Taipei Times
The council asserted that Qing officials had built Paojhong Ting after the Lin Shuang-wen (林爽文) rebellion in 1787 and 1788, Lin said.
After temple board member Huang Yuan-hsien (黃遠賢) pointed out the mistake, the council changed the text to read that Paojhong Ting was founded by Wang Ting-chun (王廷昌) and other unnamed local gentry, which is still wrong, Lin said.
The temple’s founder was his ancestor Lin Hsien-kun (林先坤), a loyalist Hakka who played a major role in stemming the rebellion in the area, he said.
During the late Qing Dynasty, many Hakka people migrated from China to Taiwan, including his ancestors, who established the Lioujhangli (六張犁) settlement, he said.
For self-defense, Hakka organized village militias to protect their settlements from bandits and Aboriginal headhunters, he said.
During the rebellion, Lin Shuang-wen’s forces took the city of Jhucian (竹塹), now Hinschu City, from which the rebels launched raids into the rice-bearing regions of Lioujhangli and Siayuan Mountain (下員山), he said.
The pillaging committed by the ill-disciplined rebels prompted Hakka leaders to summon their militia, including Lin Hsien-kun, which contributed to the imperial victory over the insurgents, he said.
After the war, Lin Hsien-kun became concerned about burying the dead, many of whom had been migrant workers at his estate, he said, adding that these men were far from home and unmarried, so they could not be interred in ancestral shrines of their own.
Consequently, Lin Hsien-kun, his cousin Liu Chao-chen (劉朝珍) and another landowner surnamed Tai (戴) donated land so that the men could be buried with native-born loyalists, Lin Kuang-hua said.
The council said the current version of the text on its Web site was supplied by the county government, which had verified the account.
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