Name origin
- The city grew up from a small village called in the 17th century Dagou (打狗), which was the name of a local tribe or "bamboo forest" in the local tribe's language.
The village was certainly not called "Dagou", which is Mandarin. The Southern Min pronounciation is Táⁿ-káu, which sounded like "Taka-o" to the Japanese, who then wrote it as 高 (taka-) 雄 (o).
i.e. {Austronesian word that sounded like Takao} -> written as 打狗 in Southern Min -> re-written as 高雄 in Japanese -> 高雄 pronounced Ko-hiông in Taiwanese/Kao-hsiung in Mandarin
A-giau 04:32, 11 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I don't see the point here. The village was originally named in the local language that lacks a common romanization scheme, and sinosized into "Dagou". Since both "Dagou" and "Táⁿ-káu" are both transliterations into other language (Mandarin and Souther Min respectively), I don't see why Southern Min should be prefered over Mandarin, which has been the official language for all the governments that has ruled Kaohsiung. Uly 18:16, 11 August 2005 (UTC)
World's Largest Container Ports
An anonymous editor recently removed the statement that Kaohsiung was the world's third-largest container port, noting that the third-largest is actually Pusan. I thought I would add a reference. According to [1], the largest container ports in 2002, in order, are: Hong Kong, Singapore, Pusan, Shanghai, Kaohsiung, and Shenzhen. [2] asserts that Shanghai and Shenzhen are third- and fourth- largest ports as of 2003.
But the order of top ports changes drastically dpending on whether one is ranking their traffic by tonnage or by container traffic volume. According to a data file available from the American Association of Port Authorities, the top six by volume are as noted above, but the top six by gross tonnage are Singapore, Rotterdam, Shanghai, South Louisiana, Hong Kong, and Houston. Ranked by tonnage, Kaohsiung was no higher than 10th. Note that South Louisiana ranks very high by tonnage but not by container volume because it handles a lot of bulk cargo.
I hope this information is helpful to someone. -- Dominus 14:45, 5 Nov 2004 (UTC)