From Takow to Kaohsiung

Disused and unorthodox romanizations of Taiwan place names



Over the last couple of decades alone, systems used to spell Taiwan's county, city, town, village, district, street and many other place names (not to mention random usages and accidental misspellings) have undergone frequent transformations.

The main systems used recently include: Post Office system (邮政式拼音: PO), Tongyong Pinyin (通用拼音; TP) and Hanyu Pinyin (漢語拼音; HP). Sadly, this author's favoured system, Gwoyeu Romatzyh (國語羅馬字: GR) has never been used (not just for place names, but for pretty much everything).

The postal romanization (PO) was a variation of Nanking Syllabary developed by Herbert Giles in 1892 and adopted by the Chinese Imperial Post under the Chinese Maritime Customs Service led by Irishman Robert Hart. It is based on Southern Mandarin pronunciation, that is, the Jianghuai regionalect widely spoken in Jiangsu and Anhui provinces, including Nanjing.(source: wikipedia)

The default used in this blog is Hanyu Pinyin but, in line with central government usage at time of publication, accords with various notable exceptions. These include most of the larger cities and counties, such as Taipei, Kaohsiung, Hsinchu, Changua,Chiayi, Hualien, Taitung, Keelung &c.

Even earlier romanizations, such as spellings adopted during the local Dutch and Spanish colonies of the 17th century, Zheng family's Kingdom of Tongning (東寧王國; 1661~83), Manchurian / Chinese Qing dynasty (1683~1895), and Period of Japanese Rule (1895~1945), as well as those of other foreigner visitors and residents, muddy the water even further.

Yixian Road (逸仙路) on the east side of Natrional Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall (國立國父紀念館) in Taipei's Xinyi District must have been pretty much unique, however, in having its street sign in Mandarin ("Yixian") at one end of its short length, and Cantonese ("Yat-sen") at the other, albeit for the same Chinese characters. These have since been unified.

Hsinyi: former PO spelling of Xinyi
Jen'ai: former PO spelling for Ren-ai
liehhsu: [MC: is this perhaps Fujianese (Minnan 閩南語) influence on Lieyu (烈嶼; Hoklo su)]
Quemoy: a very unusual romanization, this was for a long time the standard English spelling for Kinmen (HP/TP Jinmen) but, in this case, it is perhaps derived from a Spanish or Portuguese transcription of the Zhangzhou Fujianese (Minann 閩南語) pronunciation of the name Kim-mui.(source here)
Taibei: largely unused HP spelling of Taipei
Xinzhu: largely unused HP spelling of Hsinchu
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[MC: This list will be continually updated during the life of this blog. Whether the examples will make any resulting book will depend on space and cost.]

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