subtitle
-- Working draft for upcoming book by Mark Caltonhill, author of "Private Prayers and Public Parades - Exploring the religious life of Taipei" and other works.
Sunday, 16 January 2022
Sandimen Township (三地門鄉), Pingtung County
Sandimen (三地門; lit. "Three Earth Gate") derives from the Paiwan name Timur, whose meaning is not known (even Pingtung's Tjimur Dance Theatre makes no reference to this in their introduction). This was adapted by Hoklo-speaking immigrant Han-Chinese as 山豬毛 (Hoklo: Soaⁿ-ti-mng; "Mountain Boar Hair / Bristle") and 山地門 (Hoklo: Soaⁿ-te-mng; "Mountain Earth Gate") [MC: persumably by adding the word 山 "mountain(ous)", which the area certainly is, to a transliteration of Timur].
This latter was used during the Period of Japanese Rule, albeit pronounced Sanchimon, but following retrocession to ROC rule in 1945, the first and last characters were changed to 三地盟 (Mdn. Sandimeng; "Three Earth Allaince", and then to just 三地 (Mdn. Sandi; "Three Earths") in 1947.
Finally, [MC: following increased democracy and autonomy for local people], in 1992 the township's gained its current name of 三地門.
Copyright Jiyue Publications 2022
Saturday, 15 January 2022
Men (門; "Door / Gate / Gap / Harbor")
門 (Mdn. men; Hakka mun; Hoklo mng / mui) originally meant "door / gate", of which it is a pictograph.
In place names, however, it has at least tfour hree derived functions:
i) A narrow pass between high cliffs that thus resemble 石門 ("Stone Gates"; Mdn. shi-men), such as at
a) Shimen Village, Mudan Township (牡丹), Pingtung County, where Mt. Shimen (石門山; 370m) and Mt. Wuchongxi (五重溪山; 450m) tower over an accessible pass below that is only around 30m wide. Being easily defended, this was the site of Shimen Ancient Battlefield (石門古戰場) where in 1874 Paiwan warriors fought the punitive expeditionary force of Japanese following the Mudan Incident (牡丹社事件) of 1871 in which 54 Ryukyuan sailors were murdered by Paiwan Aborigines after they were shipwrecked nearby ... (more here).
b) Shimen Reservoir (石門水庫) in Fuxing District (復興), Taoyuan City, which similarly has two large rocks on either side of the Dahan River (大漢溪) where it exits from the Central Mountain Rance. Or used to, since the gap was dammed to create the reservoir in the late 1950s~early 1960s.
- - Shimen Reservoir site before construction of the dam showing the "stone gates" (photo from Wikipedia)
ii) A rock arch that creates a natural, erosion-formed "door /window" to the sea, such as the 石門洞 ("stone gate cave"; Mdn. shi-men dong) in Shimen District (石門), New Taipei City, the most northerly point of Taiwan proper.
- - Shimen Cave, New Taipei City (photo JYP)
iii) A coastal entrance to a place, that is, a harbor, such as Kinmen (金門; "Golden Gate / Harbor") or the nearby Xiamen (廈門; "Mansion Gate / Harbor") in Fujian Province, China.
iv) Its phonetic value of men in Mandarin or, more likely historically, mng / mui in Hoklo Taiwanese, such as in Sandimen Township (三地門; lit. "Three Earth Gate") in Pingtung County, which derived from a convoluted transliteration of the Paiwan name Timur, in which "ti" became 豬 (Hoklo: di; lit. "pig") and later 地 (Hoklo: de; "earth"), while "mur" became 毛 (Hoklo: mo / mng; "hair") and 門 (Hoklo: mng / mui; "gate").
One other interesting example is Luermen (鹿耳門; lit. "Deer Ear Gate") in Tainan, which probably represents a combination of iv) and iii), that is, an Aboriginal place name that sounded something like mng / mui (note, for example, the 17th-century Dutch spelling of "Lacquymoye "), which happened to be a harbor as well.
One possible example (the name's origins are not known for sure) of a place name with 門 having its original meaning of "door" is Neimen (內門) District of Kaohsiung City, which perhaps had a similar origin to Shimen Reservoir (above) with rocks protecting both sides of a river, but perhaps also derived from the "door" of a Buddhist scholar who brought eruidition to the Aboriginal territory early in the 18th century (see here).
Copyright Jiyue Publications 2022
Friday, 14 January 2022
Dabenkeng (大坌坑) Site, Bali District, New Taipei City
Dabenkeng (大坌坑; also romanized as "Tapenkeng (TPK)", lit. "Large Dust(y) Gorge") in Bali District near the southern bank of the River Danshui estuary was the site of the archaeological excavation in 1958 of a early Neolithic culture dating from c.5600 BP (c.3600 BCE) onwards. It thus gave its name to this culture, sites of which have been found widely along the coasts of Taiwan proper and the Penghu archipelago.
Some similarities in artifacts found at these sites with those in Kinmen and elsewhere along the southeast coast of China have led to a suggestion that these were the ancestral homelands from which the people of Dabenkeng Culture left the mainland, perhaps due to the movement of Han-Chinese or other peoples expanding their territories southwards or perhaps because of climatic or population pressures local to the continental coastal regions.
Around 2200 BC, Dabenkeng Culture developed into locally differentiated cultures throughout Taiwan, including, possibly, ancestors of one or more of today's Aborigines, as well as perhaps other memebers of the Austronesian language group overseas. Indeed, some scholars maintain these were the first farming people to arrive in Taiwan and, after spreading along the island's coastline, migrated throughout the Pacific and Indian oceans.
Copyright Jiyue Publicaions 2022
Kinmen (金門) Archipelago, Kinmen County, Fujian Province, ROC
Kinmen (金門; lit. "Golden Gate"), which lies just 10 kilometers east of the PRC's Xiamen Harbor (廈門港) but 227 kilometers west of Taiwan proper, still uses the former Post Office romanization system; in Hanyu Pinyin it would be spelled Jinmen. (Notes on Taiwan's place name romanizations: here)
For many decades (and perhaps even to some extent today), Kinmen was known in English (& other European languages) as Quemoy, which Wikipedia suggests may have originated as a Spanish or Portuguese transcription of the Zhangzhou Hokkien pronunciation Kim-mui of 金門. Thus the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis (八二三炮戰; "August 23rd Artillery Battle") which started in 1958 and continued off and on until the normalization of diplomatic relations between the United States and the PRC in 1979, is also known as the Quemoy Incident.
Accoring to the Kinmen National Park website, the name Kinmen dates from 1387 when the Ming-dynasty military sought to beef up its defenses against pirates pillaging China's southeastern coastline with a "golden force that guards at the gate of southern waters,”from which 金門 was derived.
Han-Chinese habitation dated from at least the 4th century CE when six families fled south to escape military invasion of the Central Plains by northern nomadic tribes, at which time it became known as Wuzhou (浯洲; "State of Wu", [MC; though the only definition of 浯 in the dictionary is "the name of a river in Shandong Province"]).
From archaeological excavation of the Fuguodun Site (復國墩), human habitation can been traced back to 5800~8000 years ago. This culture, which shows similarities with the Dabenkeng (大坌坑) Culture of Taiwan, was probably ancestral to today's Aboriginal ethnic groups of the Austronesian Language Group.
Copyright Jiyue Publicaitons 2022
Wednesday, 12 January 2022
Tingzhou Road (汀州路), or is it Dingzhou Road, Taipei City.
Tingzhou Road (汀州路) runs from Wanhua District (萬華區) at its northwestern end, through Zhongzheng District (中正區), to Wenshan District (文山區) at its southern point.
According to Wikipedia, it was constructed on the open corridor left following demolition of the old Taipei-Xindian railway line in 1965 but, since the same claim is made on another Wikipedia page for the nearby, largely parallel, and much straighter Roosevelt Road (羅斯福路; named after 32nd US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in office 1933-1945), it is tempting to trust the latter.
Most local people used to call this "Dingzhou Rd.", however; in fact, many still do. It's most unlikey that they pay much heed to the romanized spellings of their street names, but this wouldn't have helped anyway, since under the old spelling system "ㄉㄧㄥ" and "ㄊㄧㄥ" were romanized as "ting" and "t'ing", but since the apostrophe was routinely dropped (otherwise, for example, there would be T'aiwan and T'aipei), both would become "Tingchou Rd." Moreover, even after the Taipei City Government started using Hanyu Pinyin, it mistakenly used "Dingzhou Rd." for several years, before correcting signs to the current "Tingzhou".
More likely they were simply not familiar with the River Ting (汀江) or the ancient Tang-dynasty state and modern city of Tingzhou (汀州) in China's Fujian Province, and were simply practicing the technique when encountering a character one doesn't know the pronunciation for of 有邊讀邊 無邊讀中間 ([when] there is a side [element], read the side; [if] there's no side [element], read the middle [element]). This is frequently successful since most Chinese characters are composed of two parts, one semantic and the other phonetic. Indeed, while 汀 is just such a character, with the three dots on the left indicating water, that is, a river, and the 丁 on the right functioning as a phonetic indicator, unfortunately there has evidently been some phonetic shifting over the last 2,000-plus years since 丁 and 汀 must have been pronounced the same, as the former is now pronounced "ding" and the latter "ting". Oh dear.
Given the Taipei City Government's historical prediliction for naming its streets after places in China [MC: perhaps to honor civilian officials in the KMT postwar administration or military figures who faught and/or died in the anti-Japanese / anti-CCP wars], it is not surprising, especially if these are obscure and thousdands of kilometers from Taiwan, that local people sometimes mispronounce the characters. Tingzhou is just across the Taiwan Strait in Fujian Province, much harder say, 臨沂街 (Linyi Street) named for Linyi (臨沂; lit. "Close to River Yi"; [MC: perhaps selected because it was the hometown of 3rd-century CE military Strategist Zhuge Liang {諸葛亮}) City further to the north in Shandong Province, especially as 沂 seems to be composed of "water" (i.e. river) semantic element on the left, and 斤 (Mdn. jin) on the right, suggesting a pronunciation of Linjin St., or perhaps Linzhe St. (after 折 (Mdn. zhe; "to break off / bend").
[MC; Completely irrelevant to this blog but perhaps of interest to some anyway: 丁字路口 (Mdn. ding-zi-lu-kou) is not the 口 ("mouth", i.e. "entrance") to 丁字路 (Dingzi Road) but is the Chinese word (yes, Chinese words can have 4 characters, it is not a monosyllabic language as is often claimed) for "T-junction", since it literally means "丁-character-road-entrance". Similarly, 十字路口 (Mdn. shi-zi-lu-kou; lit. "十-character-road-entrance") is the Chinese word for "crossroads".]
Copyright @ Jiyue Publications 2022
Nangang (南港) District, Taipei City
The area now known as Nangang (南港; lit. "Southern Port") was opened up for farming after that of neighboring Sikou (錫口; now Songshan 松山) to its west, Usually the name is explained as deriving from the habitation being located on the south bank of Keelung River, but Abe Akiyoshi (安倍明義; 台灣地名研究 "Studies on Taiwan's Place Names"; 1938) suggests it was specifically in relation to Keelung Port, which was also known as 北港 ("Northern Port"; Mdn.Beigang).
Tuesday, 11 January 2022
AB BA Roads (and Bridges)
One method behind the naming of Taiwan's roads (& bridges) is to take one character from the name of the place the road leaves from plus one character from the name of the place it goes to.
Sometimes this creates strange road names, such as "Deep South" (深南; Mdn. Shennan) Road that runs between Shenkeng (深坑; "Deep Gorge") District in New Taipei City and Nangang (南港; "Southern Harbor") District in Taipei City. Actually, this is not quite true since, as is typical with such AB BA roads, halfway between Shenkeng and Nangang, the connecting road changes its name from Shennan to Nanshen (南深; lit. "Southern Deep").
> .................... Nanhu (南湖; lit. "Southern Lake") Great Bridge (大橋; Mdn. Daqiao)
> .....................connects Taipei City's Nangang and Neihu (內湖; lit. "Inner Lake") Districts.
> .....................(photo by MC, copyright Jiyue Publications)
Other examples include Taoying Road (桃鶯路) in Taoyuan City (桃園市) which becomes Yingtao Road (鶯桃路) in Yingge District (鶯歌區) in New Taipei City (新北市).
[To be continued ...]
Text and photo copyright Jiyue Publications 2022
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