[quote=“hsinhai78”][quote=“hansioux”][quote=“hsinhai78”][quote=“hansioux”][quote=“Hokwongwei”]
[ul]1: Shilin: The area was home to a large number of schools and academies during the late Qing years, earning it the name “a forest of scholars”-- 士子如林, abbreviated to 士林 [/ul][/quote]
I think that’s probably a Chinese reinvention, like if someone were to say Kaohsiung is so named because it once had very tall bears. [/quote]
Kaohsiung is spelled 高雄 and not 高熊 . Whitey McWhite might think that way after two months summer school at Shida-MTC. :roflmao:[/quote]
Actually it’s spelt Takao and not Kaohsiung. Unfortunately if those in power were wilfully ignorant of the island’s history, there was nothing people could do about it.[/quote]
And New York is New Amsterdam. Names of places evolve and there is usually nothing people can do. Moreover, I do not see any effort of the DPP-led Kaohsiung city government or local groups to change the name. Who wants to live in “beat the dog” ?[/quote]
Oddly enough, the story I heard is the city actually got its old name from a group of sailors from NYC who were passing by Southern Taiwan in the mid 1800s and noticed an unusual bovine in the area. The NYC sailors started referring to the community “The Cow” but because of their heavy regional accents it sound more like “Da Cow” and thus we got Takao.
An alternate version of this story goes that after WWII there were a few American soldiers in the Southern Taiwan city who noticed a herd grazing on some open land by the waterfront, and they came to refer to the area as the “Cow Shore”. That name got mushed a little bit in Mandarin to Kaohsiung and stuck.
Hey, we’ve got Cow Palace in SF and Cowpens in the Carolinas . . . seems believable to me.