Taipei, Shanghai rebuilding old connection

Anyone who has visited Taipei and Shanghai has probably noticed that many street names in the two cities seem quite similar. This phenomenon is far from a coincidence and reflects the historic ties between the two cities.

After Japan handed over Taiwan to the ROC in 1945, a civil engineer named Cheng Ting-pang was placed in charge of renaming all of the city's streets, which were either merely numbered or had Japanese names.

Cheng, a Shanghai native, took his cue from his hometown by naming the various streets after cities and provinces across the Chinese mainland.

Streets in the northwest section of the city were named after geographic places in northwest China, while streets in the city's southeast were named after southeastern Chinese places, and so on. Several main arteries of Taipei, such as Zhongshan North-South Road and Linsen North-South Road, had also been named after corresponding major streets in Shanghai.

The names of those major Shanghai streets were eventually changed by the communists in 1949, leaving Taipei's street names even more Shanghainese than Shanghai itself.

A lot of people mistakenly believe that names such as “Jianguo” and “Fuxing,” which refer to “nation-building” and “restoration,” were given to Taipei streets to reflect the government's former policy of seeking to “reclaim the mainland” from communist rebels.

But in fact, these names were also lifted from the map of Shanghai and had been chosen long before anyone realized the mainland was going to be lost.

Many stories about the Taipei-Shanghai connection, such as this one about street names, were recently published in a book entitled “Wide Rivers and Seas 1949” by renowned Taiwan author Lung Ying-tai, who told the stories of mainland refugees who fled to Taiwan in that fateful year so that younger generations would remember.

While Lung has said that publication of a mainland Chinese version of her “1949” book is delayed for now, we hope the book will inevitably get published so that people on both sides will come to understand each other more.

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