Takau became Kaohsiung, Taiwan's port powerhouse
Kaohsiung City holds about 2.7 million people, Taiwan's third-largest city and southern giant. After absorbing Kaohsiung County in 2010 it spans 2,952 square kilometres from harbor to Yushan wilderness, the island's largest city by area, and its port moves most of the nation's containers.
As a special municipality, Kaohsiung anchors southern Taiwan's factories, steel mills, refineries, freight yards, and shipyards. Urban-network rankings place it in a mid-tier global-city band for regional connectivity. Its harbor moves over 67 percent of Taiwan's containers and is the island's busiest port, while the international airport ranks second by passenger volume. Fleet headquarters and a naval academy sit here, and newer waterfront galleries, concert venues, and music halls have widened the tourist draw. Downtown wraps the harbor with Cijin Island as a natural breakwater; the Love River empties through the old city, and Zuoying's military harbor lies to the north.
Hoklo settlers called the area Takau—characters that surface-read as "beat the dog," though one theory traces the word to Siraya Austronesian for "bamboo forest," and another to metathesis from the Makatao tribe. Dutch colonists knew it as Tancoia for about three decades; after Koxinga's Kingdom of Tungning expelled them in 1662, Zheng Jing briefly renamed the village Banlian-chiu in 1664 before Takau returned. Japan, after the 1895 cession, kept the sound in 1920 as Takao (after a Kyoto place) under Takao Prefecture. Under the Republic of China the same characters were read in Mandarin as Kaohsiung via Wade–Giles. Written history starts in the early seventeenth century, but archaeology finds human activity back roughly 4,700–5,200 years at sites such as Shoushan and Longquan Temple; Chen Di's 1603 pirate-clearing report already listed Ta-kau Isle.
Qing rule from 1684 folded the town into Fongshan County and opened it as a port. Japanese planners modernized the harbor, rail terminus, and industries—refinery, machinery, shipbuilding, cement—and wartime aluminum drew on Sun Moon Lake hydroelectric power; Task Force 38 and FEAF heavily bombed the city in 1944–45. After 25 October 1945 the ROC created provincial Kaohsiung City and County; the city became a special municipality on 1 July 1979, then merged with the county on 25 December 2010 with dual centers in Lingya and Fongshan. Its modern identity is the deep-water industrial port that overtook Keelung and, by the late 1970s, surpassed Tainan as Taiwan's second city.
Source: Kaohsiung
