The Land Brokers

The expansion of Han Chinese settlement across Taiwan's plains during the Qing era operated through a distinctive set of legal instruments — known collectively as indigenous land contracts, or fan qi — that served as the formal mechanism through which frontier agricultural land moved from indigenous to Han Chinese ownership and control. These contracts existed at the intersection of Qing legal norms, indigenous customary practices, and the raw economics of land hunger, and they produced outcomes that were systematically disadvantageous to the indigenous communities who entered into them.

Zhang Dajing operated within this system with exceptional effectiveness. Arriving in the central Taiwan frontier zone in the early eighteenth century with the official designation of interpreter — a position that gave him formal authorization to interact with indigenous communities — he leveraged his language skills and personal relationships with Taokas and Papora tribal leaders to accumulate land-use rights across a wide area. His signature technique was the exchange of irrigation infrastructure for land access: he financed the construction of canals and weirs that brought water to previously uncultivable land, and accepted rights over the newly irrigated acreage as payment. The arrangement was beneficial to both parties in the short term — the tribe gained water, Zhang gained land — but the long-term effect was to transfer the productive base of indigenous territories into Han Chinese hands. He became one of the largest landholders in central Taiwan, his fortune built on contracts that had seemed, at the time of signing, to offer fair value.

Pan Xianwen's position was different and in some ways more tragic. A Kavalan intermediary on the northeastern frontier around present-day Yilan, he navigated the impossible role of advocate and facilitator simultaneously — helping Han settlers access Kavalan land and resources while attempting to negotiate terms that would leave his community with enough of a material base to survive the transition. His efforts produced contracts that were somewhat more explicit about terms than the norm, but could not ultimately reverse the structural disadvantage of a non-literate indigenous community negotiating with parties who controlled the writing, the courts, and the administrative apparatus. In his later years, Pan led a group of Kavalan families southward along the eastern coast, resettling in the Hualien area in an attempt to find land beyond the reach of Han expansion — a journey that prefigured the forced relocations and dispersals that would characterize Taiwan's indigenous experience in the centuries that followed.