Simple Map of Taiwan

Go to Tables of Taiwan Place Names

It is a pet peeve of mine that most textbooks use geographical terms that are not found on the maps they provide.

This map covers Táiwān 臺灣  /  台湾, including the Pescadores islands in the Táiwān Strait (constituting Pénghú Xiàn 澎湖縣  /  澎湖县).

The map shows county (xiàn 縣 / 县, Hokkien: koän) names and the names of municipalities (shì 市, Hokkien: chhï) that count administratively at the same level as counties or higher. (A listing of about 400 names of Taiwan administrative units is separately available [link].)

Táiběi and Gāoxióng are considered (in Táiwān) to be "special cities" with the equivalent of "provincial" administrative status (comparable to the province of Táiwān itself).

In 2010, Táinán Xiàn (TNX) was absorbed into Tainan City (TNS), which formerly had itself been part of the xiàn, and the various townships (xiāng 鄉  /  乡, Hokkien: hiong) and zhèn 鎮  /  镇, Hokkien: tìn) within the county were converted to districts (qū 區  /  区, Hokkien: khu), which were further subdivided into neighborhoods (lǐ 里, Hokkien: lí), often corresponding to former villages, although the suffix lǐ was not usually added to their names. Like Táiběi and Gāoxióng, Táinán, made up of the old Táinán Xiàn and Táinán Shì, is now also considered a "special municipality," by area the largest of the three. The consolidation of TNX and TNS is NOT represented on this map, since most sources you are likely to read differentiate them.

The three-letter abbreviations used on this map and elsewhere on this web site for the county and municipality names are not official; they are my own invention. As with the China map, they allow this one to serve as an exercise in addition to being a reference.

The "postal" spellings are those most common in books about Táiwān. Since 1945 Táiwān's government has tried halfheartedly to officialize several Romanization systems, both for place names and more broadly. However, the main goal has been to avoid using the mainland's now universal Pinyin system, and little effort was made in Táiwān to produce efficiency, consistency, or conformity. Expect extreme variation!

Hokkien (Taiwanese) transcriptions on this page make slight compromises with standard spellings to facilitate computer handling. (Details) There is a good deal of dialect variation within Hokkien, even within Taiwan. For example, the city of Jīlóng is ke-lông or koe-lâng or ki-liông or ke-lâng depending upon the speaker. The pronunciations given here follow Guerrino Marescano's English-Amoy Dictionary (Taichung: Maryknoll Fathers, 1979), which lists Hokkien pronunciations for all three-digit zip codes defined at the time of publication (pp. 857-862).

• If you would like to print out a reference copy of the map, click on it to get a page with the map alone.
• Eight relatively challenging interactive quizzes are available to help you review this page if you wish to use them. Each quiz opens into its own window in case you wish to refer to this page as you try them.
  Quiz Links: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 (Quizzes 5 and 6 make use of Chinese Characters.)

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