Colonial Powers and Geographic Naming: A Case Study of Orchid Island (Lanyu), Taiwan

Abstract

This paper discusses how geographical naming was applied by various colonial powers during their initial exploration and mapping of an indigenous island. In a case study of Orchid Island, we compare the cartographic works performed by three colonial powers during the seventeenth—nineteenth centuries of Taiwan, namely, the Dutch East India Company, the Ching Empire and the Japanese Empire. Instead of documenting the toponymic change, our target is to uncover the strategies of place-naming in accordance with the underlying exploration purposes and cartographic perspectives. Early Dutch and Chinese explorers were found to behave in a similar way by denoting Orchid Island with ambiguous names derived from external societies, simply illustrating a geo-referenced dot on the general maps of Taiwan. On the other hand, the Japanese explorers strived to compile the first large-scale map of Orchid Island with names identifiable with local geography. It should be noted that both political and ethnographic interests were involved with the Japanese mapping of Orchid Island in the late 1890s, which resulted in two versions of toponyms, one is information-driven and the other based on local knowledge. To conclude, heterogeneous ways to deal with indigenous place names were found to reflect different colonial interests and cartographers’ interactions with local society.