What's in a Name?

One cannot write of major - or minor - events without attempting to give at least some idea of where they took place. A simple enough task one might think, but with many traps for the unwary when dealing with the China coast. This is at least partly because, with only a few notable exceptions in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Chinese have until recently not been great navigators or maritime cartographers.

It was thus left to ill-educated local fishermen and farmers to provide the names by which most of the features of the South China Coast are known. These people had no reason to honour anyone by naming capes or bays after them and knew little of the world outside their own immediate concerns. They thus tended to be severely practical in naming localities; which is all very well for them but can be confusing to outsiders. The South China coastline has a plethora of `White Sand Bays' (Pak Sha Wan) for example, and the Hong Kong archipelago alone has no less than three `Big Wave Bays' (Tai Long Wan). These local names were not written on any charts, being passed on from father to son by means of traditional `poems' which were repeated orally and included local navigation hazards.

When earnest young Royal Naval hydrographers appeared in the area with their sextants and compasses to make the first accurate charts, it was to the fishermen they went to find out the local names. Well... it was too good an opportunity for people with a robust and ribald sense of humour to miss. Some of them probably hurt themselves trying not to laugh as the surveyors solemnly wrote down such traditional local names as Fan-gwai Lan (`Foreign Devil's Prick') and Hai-sze Wan (`Cunt-hair Bay'). But such is the power of the written word - even on charts - that some of these names triumphantly replaced the original ones. Duk Ngau (`Unicorn Rock') in Mirs Bay is to this day marked on Admiralty charts as Gau Tau (`Penis Head'), the name which is now used even by Chinese sailors.