National Treasures & Important Cultural Properties
of National Institutes for Cultural Heritage, Japan

　This is an old Japanese business document (cho), in which Gufukuji Temple demanded the governor of Yamato Province in Enkyu 4 (1072) to exempt the farms in the manors the temple own in Yamato from taxation according to precedent. The text is comprised of ninety-five lines, listing the temple’s properties which amount to an area 92 cho 2 dan 321 bu including the outland of the temple in Takaichi County, with three signatures including one by an esoteric teacher in charge of supervising the clerical work of the temple (Kengyo Ajari) at the end of the text.
　At the end of this volume, fifteen lines of letters indicating the judgment of the chief governor of Yamato Province that the listed farms were approved as being owned by Gufukuji Temple as they had claimed are added and seams between the sheets of papers and letters of the judgment by the chief official are stamped with the “Seal of Yamato Province” twenty times in total.
　Gufukuji Temple, also called Kawaharadera Temple, was one of the largest temples in the Asuka and Hakuho periods. In the ninth century, it became a branch temple belonging to Toji Temple. This document is fundamental historical material indicating the manor owned by Gufukuji Temple in the eleventh century and it is very valuable because it tells the size of the manors owned by the temple and the situation of tax exemption approved by the provincial governor at the time of the “Governor’s Order on the Rearrangement of Manors in the Enkyu era (Enkyu no Sho’en Seiri rei).”