From Takow to Kaohsiung

Taiwan (台灣)

At first sight, the name Taiwan might seem to mean some kind of “terraced bay” or a “bay with a lookout tower”.

But it turns out that “Taiwan”, like so many names of towns, villages, hills and rivers throughout the island, merely functions for its phonetic not semantic value, that is, it represents a transliteration of a pre-script (i.e. prehistoric) Aboriginal tribe’s name. The meaning of this is lost, but -an, which is a fairly common suffix, perhaps denotes a “place”.

This tribe (i.e., village) was located on a sandbar that is a part of today’s Tainan (台南). This was written in 17th-century Dutch texts as Tayouan (and similar spellings; and later Tywan by the British), and was taken up by Han-Chinese immigrants as Tai-oan, written using 大員 (and similarly-pronounced characters).

The current 臺灣/台灣 became the standard after the Qing court finally defeated the Zheng-family Tongning (東寧) State in 1683, after the latter had kicked the Dutch out in 1662.

Tayouan, that is, Tainan, was where the Dutch East India Company established its headquarters at the beginning of its four-decade stay on Taiwan, and its continued pre-eminent position during the subsequent Han-Chinese colonization of the island presumably accounts for this once-local name coming to represent the whole territory.

Copyright Jiyue Publications, 2021