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Keelung

City in Taiwan

  • 11 min read
  • 12 chapters
Keelung Skyline
Taiwankengo · CC BY-SA 4.0

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In 1626, the Spanish established Fort San Salvador at present-day Keelung, an area inhabited by the Taiwanese indigenous peoples. Control of the area eventually passed to the Qing dynasty. Fighting between the Chinese and the Europeans around Keelung occurred in the 19th century during the First Opium War and the Sino-French War. The island of Taiwan was subsequently ceded to the Empire of Japan in 1895 after the First Sino-Japanese War; under Japanese rule the city was called Kirun. Keelung became part of Taiwan Province under the Republic of China after 1945. Administratively, the city became a first-level subdivision in 2018 after the provincial government was abolished.

Name

According to early Chinese accounts, this northern coastal area was originally called Pak-kang (Chinese: 北港; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: Pak-káng). By the early 20th century, the city was known to the Western world as Kelung, as well as the variants Kiloung, Kilang and Keelung. In his 1903 general history of Taiwan, US Consul to Formosa (1898–1904) James W. Davidson related that "Kelung" was among the few well-known names, thus warranting no alternate Japanese romanization.

However, the Taiwanese people have long called the city Kelang (Chinese: 雞籠; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: Ke-lâng/Koe-lâng; lit. 'rooster cage', 'hencoop" or "chicken coop'). While it has been proposed that this name was derived from the local mountain that took the shape of a rooster cage, it is more likely that the name was derived from the first inhabitants of the region, as are the names of many other Taiwanese cities. In this case, the Ketagalan people were the first inhabitants, and early Han settlers probably approximated "Ketagalan" with Ke-lâng (Ketagalan: ke- -an, "domain marker circumfix" + Taiwanese Hokkien 儂／人; lâng; 'person'), with the noun root and the suffix part of the circumfix replaced together with the common Taiwanese Hokkien term for people, shortening the circumfix to just its prefix part.

In 1875, during the late Qing era, a new official name was given (Chinese: 基隆; pinyin: Jīlóng; lit. 'base prosperous'). In Mandarin, probably the working language of Chinese government at the time, both the old and new names were likely pronounced Gīlóng (hence "Keelung").

Under Japanese rule (1895–1945), the city was also known to the west by the Japanese romanization Kiirun.

In Taiwanese Hokkien, the native language of the area, the city is called Ke-lâng. In Hanyu Pinyin, the most common romanization system for Mandarin Chinese, the name of Keelung is written as Jīlóng (the shift from g to j is a recent development in the Beijing dialect; see Old Mandarin).

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