Sources & Licenses

The Site's content is built on data made public by many organizations and contributors. Every page and every photo carries its own credit; this page brings the main sources and licenses together.

Government open data (Open Government Data License, version 1.0 — 政府資料開放授權條款第 1 版; attribution required)

Openly licensed data and photos

Sources cited by link preview or attribution, for which written permission has not yet been obtained

The following sources carry no open-license statement. The Site cites them with attribution and a link to the original, and we are in the process of applying to the rights holders for written permission. If a rights holder objects, please notify us as described in Report an Error or Infringement and we will take the content down immediately.

• Matsu Daily News (馬祖日報): news thumbnails (the articles' share images).
• Matsu National Scenic Area Headquarters, Tourism Administration, Ministry of Transportation and Communications (交通部觀光署馬祖國家風景區管理處): photos of attractions, dining, and festivals.
• Various news media: news thumbnails and a small number of photos of people.
• Central Election Commission (中央選舉委員會) election bulletins and Ministry of the Interior (內政部) data on local elected officials: photos of people (the photos may have been supplied by the individuals themselves).
• Matsu Information Network (馬祖資訊網): daily activities and the events board.
• Businesses' official websites: business cover photos.
• Power outage notices on the Matsu Information Network (馬祖資訊網; posted by the Taipower Matsu District Office, 台電馬祖區營業處, and its contractors): only the dates, times, and villages are compiled, with a link back to the original.
• Parent-Child Center admission notices on the Matsu Information Network (馬祖資訊網; posted by the Lienchiang County Childcare Resource Center, 連江縣托育資源中心): only the opening hours, phone number, and admission rules are compiled, with a link back to the original.
• Notices from the Lienchiang County Health and Welfare Bureau (連江縣衛生福利局) and the township offices: only the title, date, and a link to the original are listed.
• The table of vessels entering port that the Lienchiang County Government Port Office (連江縣政府港務處) makes public: forecast and berthing times of cargo ships and passenger-cargo ships are compiled (supply ships).
• Reports in the Matsu Daily News (馬祖日報): playgrounds on the Families page (name, facilities, and current status), each marked with the date of the report and linked back to the original.
• Lexicons for the Matsu Dialect Translator (compiled by the "馬祖語輸入法" Matsu-language input method project): the lexicon of 烏衣行's online Matsu input method, the Lienchiang County Government's《馬祖福州語常用一千詞》, the Ministry of Education's (教育部) Eastern Min teaching materials, the vocabulary list of the newly compiled Matsu-language certification materials, the National Academy for Educational Research (國家教育研究院) word list, and the Ministry of Education's《重編國語辭典》(Revised Mandarin Chinese Dictionary). The license for the 烏衣行 lexicon is still being confirmed. Mandarin translations that members add to example sentences, and words that members report, are also used to teach the translator once an administrator has accepted them.
• Supplementary word pairs for the Matsu Dialect Translator (used only for words not in the main table): the Matsu dialect ↔ Mandarin word pairs compiled by 烏衣行 (github.com/gnisew/tools). The author is the same as for the romanization lexicon, and the license is likewise still being confirmed.
• Fuzhou-dialect word meanings for the Matsu Dialect Translator (used when translating Eastern Min into Mandarin, and only for words found in neither the main table nor the supplementary pairs; these are words from Fuzhou city and are not necessarily how things are said in Matsu): FuzhouBench (a data snapshot of SeeDict 米時典), by Xiaocan Li, Haoyu Lin, and the SeeDict (藍尾星) community, github.com/Nang-muoi-sing/FuzhouBench, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0; the data file compiled by the Site (fzdict.js) is likewise made available under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
• Original characters, romanization, and definitions marked "縣志" (county gazetteer) in the Matsu Dialect Translator's word lookup: Lienchiang County Government (連江縣政府).《連江縣志·語言志》(Lienchiang County Gazetteer, Language volume), part on character forms and word meanings, "方言常用本字匯集" (collection of commonly used original characters in the dialect; chief compiler 陳高志), full text. Only the six-hundred-odd entries whose definitions were complete after text extraction from the PDF are included, not the whole of the original book. The lyrics collected in the same book's practical part, "馬祖哭腔悼詞舉例" (examples of Matsu lament eulogies), have been made into a library of stock phrases: when someone pastes in hand-copied lyrics, they are compared against it by pronunciation to restore the characters, and the matched line is shown below the result. These eulogies were not written by the chief compiler of the Language volume — the gazetteer notes that they were contributed by local residents including 曹秋官, 王榕樂, 鄭美卿, 翁玉峰, 劉金嬌, 劉貴金, and 王春嬌, and that some come from the appendix of 林駿華's《馬祖喪葬禮俗研究》(master's thesis). All were recorded as found in hand-copied manuscripts, with many homophone substitutions and wrong characters; the Site has changed to the standard characters only the few places corrected by an Eastern Min specialist and reproduces the rest as recorded, so they must not be treated as standard characters.
• Entries marked "異讀" (variant readings: two readings of the same character, with example words) in the Matsu Dialect Translator's word lookup: Lianjiang County Local Gazetteer Compilation Committee (連江縣地方志編纂委員會).《連江縣志》(方志出版社, 2001), dialect chapter, "文白異讀" (literary and colloquial readings). This is the gazetteer of Lianjiang County in Fujian Province (not Matsu's《連江縣志》), and the readings are those of Lianjiang County on the mainland side; the Site transcribed them by reading the page images in the Fujian provincial gazetteer digital library (data.fjdsfzw.org.cn). The grammar example sentences and proverbs in the same book are used only as test questions for the translator and to find errors; the original sentences have not been placed on the website.
• "Sounds like" in the Matsu Dialect Translator (personal names written with homophones in hand-copied manuscripts, matched by pronunciation to recover the original name): the names and one-line descriptions in the list of opera characters and plays are compiled from the relevant Chinese Wikipedia articles (CC BY-SA 4.0, each with a link to the article) and from the introductory pages on Min opera (閩劇) and Fuzhou pinghua (福州評話) of the Fuzhou Municipal Government, the Fujian Provincial Government, and the China Intangible Cultural Heritage website; the 353 characters and place names from novels were included only after each was found in《說唐》《隋唐演義》《薛仁貴征東》《薛丁山征西》《薛剛反唐》《封神演義》《楊家將演義》《萬花樓》(Ming and Qing novels, public domain; full texts from Wikisource), and the description gives the chapter number and chapter title; "Look up an allusion" lists the chapter titles of these books plus《三國演義》, and the scene titles of the southern dramas《白兔記》and《琵琶記》— chapter titles only, with links to Wikisource for the original text (as suggested by an Eastern Min specialist: the allusions in Fuzhou-dialect lyrics mostly come from the Sui–Tang stories); the titles of Min opera plays are additionally taken from "閩劇檔案" (xiquhub.com; each with a link to that play's page; only the title and subject are taken, not the plot summaries); readings of single characters missing from the romanization lexicon are taken from the character tables of the《Dictionary of the Foochow Dialect》, third edition (1929), and of《戚林八音》as compiled by only3km/ciklinbekin (MIT License, Copyright © 2016 Hector Sioh, github.com/only3km/ciklinbekin); also listed are the chapter titles of the four volumes and forty chapters of the Hong Kong 五桂堂 nanyin songbook《正字南音三娘汲水全本》(following the cataloging of the Taiwan Music Institute, National Center for Traditional Arts — 國立傳統藝術中心臺灣音樂館 — in the Open Museum (開放博物館), each linked to the images in the muyushu digital collection of the Fung Ping Shan Library, University of Hong Kong; chapter titles only, the lyrics are not used). The sound matching is the Site's own inference and lists only "possibly"; it does not mean the original text was necessarily that name.
• The exam overview on the Matsu Language Certification page is summarized from the Ministry of Culture's 2026 Matsu Language Proficiency Test handbook; the words, definitions and example sentences in the vocabulary practice come from the Ministry's official certification word list (《新編馬祖語認證教材》詞彙表). Matsu Language Certification portal. Written permission has not yet been obtained.
• The recordings of native speakers on the Matsu Language Certification page, and the text of those sentences, come from the spoken corpus of the Ministry of Culture's Matsu Language Corpus and Speech Database (《馬祖語語料及語音庫系統》). The audio is served directly by that site; none of it is stored here.
• Word lookup in the Matsu Dialect Translator (the characters, romanization, and definitions of entries) is taken from the public query results of this corpus; some translation corrections (which word should be replaced with what) are also derived statistically from its parallel sentences: Ministry of Culture (文化部).《馬祖語語料及語音庫系統》(Matsu Language Corpus and Speech Database System). Retrieved from https://matsu.moc.gov.tw/home
• Location page of the Down Syndrome Foundation R.O.C. (中華民國唐氏症基金會; operator of the Parent-Child Center): the Parent-Child Center's address. OpenStreetMap: the locations of the buildings housing the Parent-Child Center, nursing rooms, and playgrounds.
• Cylinder gas (LPG): prices are taken from the Energy Administration, Ministry of Economic Affairs (經濟部能源署), "家用桶裝瓦斯價格" (household cylinder gas prices; monthly surveyed average prices by county and city; Open Government Data License; checked for updates daily); who supplies it, how to buy it on each island, deposits and refunds, and records of shortages are compiled from the Energy Administration's register of filling plants and its report on the outlying-island LPG market, the subsidy regulations, reports by the Matsu Daily News (馬祖日報) and the Central News Agency (中央社), and replies from the suppliers and the county government in the Matsu Daily News "遊問必答" column, each item linked back to its source. This has not been confirmed with the suppliers. The wholesale prices in the comparison chart are taken from the "液化石油氣歷史價格" (LPG price history) published by CPC Corporation, Taiwan (台灣中油) (the list price for household use at distributors, checked daily); the list price is not the same as the suppliers' actual purchase cost. The comparison of "how much other things rose over the same period" draws on the Ministry of Labor (勞動部; minimum wage), the statistical database of the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (主計總處; consumer prices and the construction cost index), CPC Corporation, Taiwan (台灣中油; diesel list price), and the Energy Administration's market analysis reports; the figures were looked up by hand in October 2026.
• Accessibility information: the accessible tours and attraction pages of the Matsu National Scenic Area Headquarters (馬祖國家風景區管理處), the on-site records (about 2018) of "友善旅人誌" by OurCityLove Social Enterprise (眾社會企業), the accessible sea travel section of the Maritime and Port Bureau, Ministry of Transportation and Communications (交通部航港局), the Matsu Airport Office (馬祖航空站), UNI Air (立榮航空), All Ports Express (全港通航業), the Lienchiang County service guidelines for the Rehabus for persons with disabilities (連江縣身心障礙者復康巴士服務要點), the Civil Affairs and Social Welfare Department of the Lienchiang County Government (連江縣政府民政社會處), the Tourism Administration (觀光署), and the Matsu Daily News (馬祖日報). Only facts are compiled, and each item links back to the original page; accessible restrooms are taken from the Ministry of Environment's (環境部) public restroom registration data. The Site has not verified these on site.
• What Matsu Needs: the Department of Statistics of the Ministry of Health and Welfare (衛生福利部統計處), the Ministry of the Interior statistics query site (內政部統計查詢網), the Population and Housing Census of the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics, Executive Yuan (行政院主計總處人口及住宅普查), the Ministry of Finance's consolidated income tax statistics (財政部綜合所得稅統計), Civil Aviation Administration statistics (交通部民用航空局統計), the manpower survey of the Lienchiang County Government's Budget, Accounting and Statistics Department (連江縣政府主計處人力資源調查), the long-term care plan of the Lienchiang County Health and Welfare Bureau (連江縣衛生福利局長照計畫), and Control Yuan (監察院) investigation reports; reports in the Matsu Daily News (馬祖日報) and its "馬上處理" section (for petitions, only the title and date are taken, for classification and statistics, with a link back to the original), the forums and editorials of the Matsu Information Network (馬祖資訊網), and news reports on media opinion polls. The sources for each gap are listed in that item's details; the degree of urgency is the Site's own judgment.
• Public Affairs Tracker: the National Audit Office's (審計部) annual "連江縣總決算審核報告" (audit reports on the Lienchiang County final accounts), the Control Yuan's (監察院) corrective measures and investigation reports, the Legislative Yuan Budget Center's (立法院預算中心) assessment reports, the proceedings of the Lienchiang County Council (連江縣議會議事錄), the Central Election Commission's (中央選舉委員會) election database and its schedule of election work for 2026 (ROC year 115), and the Lienchiang County Government (連江縣政府) website (campaign platforms, organization, and heads of agencies); reports in the Matsu Daily News (馬祖日報) and its "馬上處理" section, the forums and editorials of the Matsu Information Network (馬祖資訊網), and reports by the Central News Agency (中央社) and other media (only the title, date, and a summary are taken, with a link back to the original; nicknames of members of the public who post are not recorded). The status of each matter and its attribution to an office holder are compiled and judged by the Site on the basis of these sources and are not official determinations.
• Religions in Matsu: the numbers of registered temples and churches from the Department of Statistics, Ministry of the Interior (內政部統計處); the official websites and directories of the Catholic Archdiocese of Taipei (天主教台北總教區), the Methodist Church in the Republic of China (中華基督教衛理公會), 台北基督徒永和禮拜堂 (Taipei Christian Yonghe Chapel), the True Jesus Church (真耶穌教會), and the Church Assembly in Taiwan (臺灣眾召會) (addresses, phone numbers, meeting times); the chapters on religion in the People volume of the Lienchiang County Gazetteer (連江縣志, 2014 revision; ROC year 103) and reports in the Matsu Daily News (馬祖日報) (history, rewritten and linked back to the sources); the photos of the Nangan and Beigan Catholic churches are from Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0, with the author credited). We did not obtain the consent of each group individually; if anything is wrong, or you do not wish to be listed, please tell us through the error report.
• Matsu Daily News (馬祖日報) report of 2026-06-26: the opening hours of each gas station (CPC's open data is incomplete), with the source and date stated.
• The outpatient schedules of each public health center, published weekly by the Lienchiang County Health and Welfare Bureau (連江縣衛生福利局): departments, doctors, and sessions are compiled, with attribution and a link back to the original file. The website of the Lienchiang County Hospital (連江縣立醫院) states that reproduction is prohibited; the Site provides links only and does not use its content.
• Lejitong (樂圾通; the garbage truck tracking service of the Lienchiang County Environmental Resources Bureau, 連江縣環境資源局, with the system provided by 弋揚科技): real-time positions of garbage trucks and locations of pickup points.

Other

• 《馬祖植物誌》(Flora of Matsu; published by the Lienchiang County Government in 2004): the wildlife guide takes only the facts recorded in the book (distribution, flowering and fruiting periods, and so on); the text is rewritten in our own words, and the book's photos are not used.
• The Site's illustrations, cards, game screens, and some illustrative photo images were created by the Site using AI tools, and are labeled "illustrative" on screen according to their content.
• Matsu dialect recordings made by members are released under CC0; old-object submissions are released under CC BY 4.0.

Software

Open-source software including React, Three.js, Leaflet, OpenCC, MediaPipe, the OpenCV YuNet face detection model, and Material Icons is used under their respective MIT, BSD, and Apache 2.0 licenses.

Last updated: 2026-10-10