For the Taiwan expedition (1874) and military action to suppress local resistance after the SinoJapanese War (1894-5), Japanese navy prepared nautical charts re-engraving from British Admiralty charts. Concerning place names, Japanese Hydrographical Office tried to transcribe those on British charts into Chinese characters locally used. However, it was not easy to infer exact Chinese characters on the basis of transliterated alphabetical local place names on British charts. Although a Chinese nautical chart titled Da Qing yi tong hai dao zong tu 大清一統海道總圖 (General map of the Chinese coast and sea-routes) re-engraved from a British chart was consulted, even place names of major ports of Taiwan on it were not always correct, because it transliterated many local place names phonetically into Chinese characters. After a process of trial and error up to 1905, place names in Chinese characters conformed to local use were put on Japanese charts of Taiwan.
