Taihoku US Consulate Glossary for Taigi Location Names

Someone has found a document from the US Consulate to Taihoku (Taipei) during the Japanese era containing Romanized spellings of Taiwan location names and longitude and latitude.



Much more can be found at this site:

Under the 台北州 (Taihoku) 美國領士館資料 category, search for glossary, there’s a whole bunch of them.

Gloss for Taigi from the US Consulate



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There is a location on the second image called 殺人窩 Tâi-lâng-o (Murder Cave).

So I looked up the lat long and it’s still called that, kind of

It’s now called 殺大窩 in Taoyuan.

There is as another place called 龜子頭. Still called that today.

https://goo.gl/maps/8xkKdDEAjzpC1vKG9

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Wild.
Many many moons ago I was sponsoring a local person applying for immigration to my home country.
I don’t know how they do now, but then they required, among other things, a family tree going back like 4 generations.
In English!
The Representative Office (pre-Internet) provided a battered photocopy of a glossary of WG Romanised translations of common Taiwan names.
It was fucking mental.

ETA: It looked remarkably like that one, all the Mandarin characters were handwritten.

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Whoa, that’s pretty obscene. :open_mouth:

There’s like a dozen places with that name in Taiwan… I guess people loved naming places that back in the days.

Some places are so named because the entire region is shaped like a turtle, and there’s no other way to name the place shaped like the turtle’s head.

Other places such as this one… is name because… well…

image

There are enough places named 龜頭 that looks nothing like anything that makes me wonder if it’s a common Austronesian location name.

Maybe 頭 is Tau, Austronesian for people, and Ku is some kind of prefix.

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鵰頭? :grin:

image

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Unrelated to Taigi location names, but has something to do with the Taihoku US consulate.

Folks at the national treasure archive team found communications between the consulate and the Coca-Cola company.

The first one written on Aug 12 1911, asking Coca-Cola to send a keg of the product to the Taihoku consulate. The letter gave instructions to ship the product from Seattle to Osaka and then to Taiwan. However, the shipment instead went through Hong Kong and caused many issues and delays. The second one written half a year later on Jan 24 1912 after they’ve finally received the shipment.

An entire revolution that overthrown the Qing dynasty took place during the shipment of that keg of Coca-Cola.

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Ha, that gives me a great idea for where to place some geocaches, I’ll call it “The Hidden 龜頭” series :smiley:

My buddy placed a geocache at Nanrenshi (男人石, do a Google image search :wink:) and there’s a cache in Fucking, Austria.

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dirty thought every ten minutes