From Takow to Kaohsiung

Zhuoshui River (濁水溪), Nantou, Chiayi, Yunlin & Changhua counties

As every Taiwan schoolchild knows, at 186.6km in length and passing through four of western Taiwan’s central counties, Zhuoshui River is the nation's longest river. It is also sometimes thought of as an unofficial boundary between the island’s south and north, at least in so-called Blue-Green voting habits (see Taiwan Review).

Zhuoshui (濁水) means “Turbid Water”, and the standard explanation for the river’s name is that it derives from the large quantity of sediment in the water picked up as it erodes predominantly slate, shale and sandstone rocks in the Central Mountains catchment area.

[MC: This may be true, but it may be only part of the story. Zhuoshui’s old name was Luo River (螺溪; lit. “[Aquatic-] Snail River”), perhaps due to:
i) many river snails found there,
ii) the river frequently twisted and turned, like a snail’s shell spiral (螺’s secondary meaning); or (as is very commonly the case with Taiwan place names),
iii) it was a transliteration of an aboriginal name. Wikipedia offers Bunun: Danum qalav ang, presumably for part or all of its upper reaches. The lower reaches were formerly known as 西螺溪 (Mdn. Xiluo Xi; "Western Luo River"), a name retained in today's Xiluo Township (西螺鎮) in Yunlin County, which is said to derive from a transliteration of a Babuza (巴布薩) plains aborigine name Sailei.
In any case, (and finally we get to the point of my conjecture), 螺 in Hoklo is pronounced lê / lôe and, since 濁水溪 in Hoklo is pronounced lô-chúi-khe, the latter may indeed imply “turbidity”, but it may also be an alternative way of writing the river’s spoken name.]

Water from Zhoushui River is led away by irrigation channels to feed paddy fields of the western plain and is recorded in various township names to this day, see for example Ershui (二水) , Tianzhong (田中) and Tianwei (田尾) in Changhua County, not forgetting Taiwan's "soy sauce capital" of Xiluo (西螺) of course.



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