Sinkang Manuscripts

The Sinkang Manuscripts (Chinese: 新港文書; pinyin: Xīngǎng wénshū; Wade–Giles: Hsin-kang wen-shu; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: Sin-káng bûn-su; also spelled Sinkang or Sinkan) are a series of leases, mortgages, and other commerce contracts written in the Sinckan, Taivoan, and Makatao languages.

The missionary Robertus Junius recorded in his 1643 education report that the Sinckan school had enrolled 80 students, of which 24 were learning to write and 8 to 10 had solid penmanship, while in neighboring Baccaluan (modern-day Anding) school there were 90 students, of which 8 knew how to write.

[6] Shortly after the founding of Taihoku Imperial University in 1928, one of the scholars in the linguistics department, Naoyoshi Ogawa (小川尚義), gathered together a number of old texts in Tainan.

In 1931, Naojirō Murakami (村上直次郎) edited and published them under the title The Sinckan Manuscripts.

[8] The “Deeds of the Qing Dynasty Xingang Society Fan Fu Wang Lanmo and Others (Xingang Documents)” collected by the Kaohsiung Municipal Museum of History were designated as “Important Antiquities” by the Cultural Construction Committee of the Executive Yuan of the Republic of China (now the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of China) in 2008 ".