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.
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.
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.