perhaps it never was a "fragrant harbour"

Apparently Hong Kong (香港) might not mean "Fragrant" (香) "Harbour" (港) as often said,

but rather the "Incense" (香) exporting "Harbour" (港), though "exporting" in this case might only be up the Pearl River to China.

apparently either the timber used for incense was shipped out of here, or there were incense-manufacturing plants in the town, and incense was shipped out.

riddle no.4 / 謎語四號

Which is the odd man out:
a) Suao Town (蘇澳) in Yilan County
b) Liuying (柳營) Town in Tainan County
c) Songwu (宋屋) [Community] in Taoyaun County
d) Luodong Town (羅東) also in Yilan County?

[Photo really is a "view from the hill". It is the view back at Nanfangao and Suao harbours from the road to Hualien.]

aboriginal remains on north coast

Jinshan (金山, "gold mountain") on Taiwan's northern coast

gets its name from the aboriginal

"Kitibarri"

which was transliterated as

金包里

(Jin-bao-li in Mandarin,

but presumably the original was Hoklo Taiwanese)

during Japanese rule (1895-1945)

only the 金 part was retained

with 山 (mountain) being added

as the township lies between sea and mountain.

[The photo shows a ceremony yesterday at the 200-year-old CiHu Temple (慈護宮), dedicated to, as the neon sign says, Jinbaoli Mazu (from right to left 金包里媽祖), the seafarers' deity]

deer in the forests of Tainan, or not

In fact, Tainan’s Shanshang Township (山上鄉), is not literally “on a mountain” as its name implies, but is described as being in the 麓 (lü, “foothills”).

This is a fairly uncommon Chinese word, at least in speech. But composed of the words for deer (鹿) beneath the trees of a forest (林), at first sight it looks like a lovely compound pictograph making use of complex imagery.

Perhaps it is, for one thing it is in the dictionary under the 鹿 radical (whereas the similar character 簏 composed of deer under bamboo is found under the 竹 bamboo radical), but characters were not always categorized "correctly".

Furthermore, 鹿 is pronounced lu4, which is similar enough to the lü4 of 麓, so perhaps it is just a regular radical-phonetic compound after all.

on the mountains but not (perhaps) on the sea

Today I was researching Tainan township place name origins (cos that’s the kind of boring guy I am on vacation, though actually they’re pretty interesting because they reflect Aboriginal, Dutch, Zheng, Qing, Japanese and ROC language and history).

I got as far as Shanshang Township (山上鄉), which clearly means “On/in” the “Mountain(s)”, or according to Chinese word order, “Mountains On”.

This set me thinking about China’s Shanghai (上海), which is generally explained/translated as “On the Ocean” (for example see Asia Times Online, which translates it as “Above the Ocean”.

Probably this is correct, but perhaps not. After all, Shandong (山東) means “East of the Mountains” (unlike Tainan’s Dongshan 東山, which means “Eastern Mountain”) so we might expect 海上 (Haishang) for “On/above the Ocean”.

Chinese grammar far from being “non-existent” as many native speakers claim, or “simple” as many foreign learners claim (not having to worry about conjugations/declensions/tenses/plurals &c. perhaps), is complex because of its ambiguity. 上, for example, has a multitude of grammatical functions including prepositional “on/above ...”, adjectival “upper/last (week) ...”, adverbial “upwards”, verbal “go up” and so on.

Before the noun 海 (“ocean”, which elsewhere could also be adjectival “oceanic”, of course), 上 would normally be adjectival, making Shanghai mean “Upper Ocean”, or verbal, giving “Onto the Ocean”. For a river, 上 most commonly occurs in 上游 “upstream/upper reaches”, which might fit with Shanghai being slightly up the Huangpu River (黃浦江) from the East China Sea (東海).

Or have I been on vacation too long and the sun is addling my brain? In any case, one thing my studying of place names is teaching me is that “everything is possible” (see Bejing 北京 “Northern Capital” compared with Taipei 台北 “Taiwan North [Part?]”). So I guess Shanghai is just an unusual way of saying “on the ocean”.

Aborigines, whirling water but definitely not flowers

A great many explanations are given for the origin of the name Hualien (花蓮, "flower lotus"), including wishful thinking, such that the nearbycliffs where covered by joined(連) flowers.

Most reliable seems to be that it was called HuaLen (洄瀾,“whirling waves”) by Hoklo-speaking settlers. This is said to be a description of the swirling back of water in the Hualien River (花蓮溪) as it met the ocean.

There is also another early name of GeeLai (奇萊, and variants, QiLai in Mdn.), which Abe (安倍明義) says derived from the Amis Aboriginal name for the area, "Q Kirai" .

Some people claim 奇萊 was changed to "Hualien" during the period of Japanese rule (1895-1945) because the Japanese pronunciation sounds the same as a word for "detest".

But it seems that the change in names from 洄瀾 to the similar sounding (in Hoklo) 花蓮 dates from two decades before the Japanese, when Shen Bao-zhen (沈葆楨) petitioned the Qing court to make the change. Shen is closely tied to much of Hualien's early history because it was being explored and cleared for cultivation by Han Chinese during his stint in charge of Taiwan.

new towns, old towns

The northern suburbs of Hualien, many of which have nice, broad, tree-lined streets, belong it seems to XinCheng (新城, "new town") Township rather than Hualien (花蓮) City itself.

Xincheng dates from the 1870s when the top Qing official in Taiwan, Shen Bao-zhen (沈葆楨), had three roads constructed to connect the underdeveloped Hualien County to the rest of the island as part of Chinese attempts to civilize (subdue) Aborigines in the wake of the Mudan Incident (牡丹社事件).

Xincheng, near the north of the county, was the first "new town" to be developed.

In contrast, nearby Guangfu (光復, "Retrocession") was an Aboriginal township with a long history.

Since every household grew beans, the area was known as the hometown of bean growing, “Fataan” in the language of the Amis. This was transliterated into Hoklo Chinese as “馬太鞍”, and appeared in Qing dynasty texts under this and other Chinese names.

When the ROC administrators rolled into Hualien in 1945, they decided to upgrade the community to the level of township. As the first new township following the end of Japanese rule and the "retrocession" of Taiwan to Chinese rule, it was given the honor of being called "Retrocession”.

This was supposed to be a fish-of-the-day post, but was sidetracked to place-name history (another VftH obsession). Anyway, here's the same sign from Xincheng, but more "artistic" because VftH's chief photographer forgot to set the flash.

Hot Spring City or Dry River or Stony River

Fujianese settlers to Yilan called this area at the north end of the Lanyang Plain "DeKeh" (旱溪, "dry river", [HanXi in Mandarin]) because of the paucity of water.

The town itself was also known as Teng-a-Hsia (湯仔城, "hot-spring town", [TangZaiCheng in Mandarin])

Over time, DeKeh changed to Jiao-keh (礁溪, "stony river", [JiaoXi in Mandarin]), though most lcoal people still call it DaKeh.

Mr. Su, Mr. Roo and Mr. National Surname

Suao (蘇澳) is an unusual example of a Taiwan place name that derives from a person, a Mr. Su (蘇) who brought a group of Han Chinese to this area of the east coast to cultivate land. So 蘇澳 is Su's Bay.

But there are few similar examples.

Even street names are rarely named for people, though Chaing Kai-shek gets a mention in pretty much every city, town and village with 中正 (ZhongZheng) Road, as does Sun Yat-sen with both 中山 (ZhongShan) and 逸仙 (YiXian) roads. In Taipei there are also Lin Sen (林森) and Yen Ping (延平; for Zheng Cheng-gong) roads.

Interestingly, a few foreigners also get a mention, such as 麥帥橋 (MacArthur Bridge) and 羅斯福路 (Roosevelt Road).

Unfortunately for this survey of people's-names-to-place-names, Luodong (羅東) up the road from Suao does not mean Mr. Luo's East, but is the transliteration into Taiwanese of the local Aboriginal word for monkey, perhaps because of a local rock that looked like a monkey [though that sounds very Han Chinese to me], or perhaps because many monkeys lived in this area.

Similarly, Guoxing (國姓) Township in Nantou County apparently has nothing to do with Koxinga (國姓爺; Lord of the National Surname, a.k.a. Zheng Cheng-gong), but was a corruption from Guosheng (國勝; "National Victory"), which may be even more homophonic in Taiwanese.