Located in the town of Dongxiao in Miaoli County, Baishatun is a small coastal village. Like other seaside settlements in Taiwan, agriculture and fishing are the main sources of livelihood; residents also worship the goddess Matsu. Each year, the Baishatun Matsu makes a pilgrimage to Beikang; this is what is considered the Baishatun Matsu incense-offering ritual. This annual event is a longstanding one and steeped in tradition. The believers walk and offer incense; the route of the ritual is different each year as it is ""as per instructed by the goddess"".
The intangible cultural heritage benefits brought about by the Baishatun Matsu Pilgrimage cannot be measured by the regular market goods prices; it can only be calculated using non-market good assessment methods. The Baishatun Matsu’s incense promotion activity is to maintain its non-use value and use value through Pilgrimage activities. Which means that the Pilgrims (who have use value) maintain the non-use values of the non-users (non-Pilgrims). Consequently, the travel cost method has become the assessment method for evaluating non-use value of intangible cultural heritage. The Travel Cost Method (TCM) generally cannot assess non-use value. However, only if the Baishatun Matsu Pilgrimage keep on conduct, the use value could have connected with option value, existence value and bequest value, the nonuse value. This article uses the Travel Cost Method (TCM) to evaluate the intangible cultural heritage benefits of the Baishatun Matsu Pilgrimage activity, and creates a new benefit evaluation aspect of the travel cost method.
Moreover, the study uses TCM to assess the intangible cultural heritage benefits of the Baishatun Matsu Pilgrimage and combines it with the multi-criteria decision-making method (MCDM) to understand the proportion of six major values: ""spiritual satisfaction"", ""passing the torch"", ""leisure and tourism"", ""hometown sense of belonging"", ""physical and mental exercise"", and ""emotional exchange"" in the hearts of the ritual participants to come up with the benefits brought about by the Baishatun Matsu Pilgrimage.
The study uses the travel cost method as a base and utilizes the truncated Poisson model as the analytical tool to calculate the consumer surplus (CS) of ritual participants. Results show that, combined with the proportion obtained from the multi-criteria decision-making method, the direct use value of each person each time is NT$ 17,623 and non-direct use value is NT$ 30,174. What makes this different from the other studies is that the use of the multi-criterion decision-making (MCDM) weights with the assessment results of the travel cost method (TCM) to estimate indirect use value, which negated the limitation of the travel cost method only being able to calculate direct value. It is hoped that the results of this study may serve an important reference for Baishatun Gong-Tian Temple or government agencies in making policies for the protection and preservation of intangible cultural heritage.
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