The name of the town Checheng () combines the Chinese character for "cart", today used to refer to cars and other motorized transport, and which is used in words for walled fortresses and cities, but which in the Taiwanese historical context refers to a town with an earthen security berm. With the arrival of ethnic Chinese on Taiwan, the native
Paiwan name of
Kabeyawan was
transliterated as
Ku-piah-oan () in the
Taiwanese Hokkien language of these new settlers. Following the
period of Dutch rule in the 17th century, the name
Thóng-léng-po͘ (;
Hakka:
Thúng-liâng-phû) was used after
Koxinga's son and successor
Zheng Jing stationed troops there under a (), a military officer with rank roughly equal to a battalion commander; The suffix
po͘ () is often used for place names in Taiwan. A village gradually grew up in the area. with Checheng marked as "Chasiang" After the Manchu
Qing Dynasty assumed control of the lowlands of western Taiwan, ethnic Chinese settlers wanted protection from aboriginal attacks. A wooden
palisade was built around the town giving rise to a new name,
Chhâ-siâⁿ (; Hakka:
Tshài-sàng), using the character (
chhâ) which is the Hokkien word for "wood". Thus
Chhâ-siâⁿ has roughly the meaning of "
stockade". In 1788, the fifty-third year of the
Qianlong Emperor's rule, Manchu general
Fuk'anggan landed his army in the area to suppress the
Lin Shuangwen rebellion. In commemoration, the town received yet another name
Hok-an-chng (; also
Hok-an-siâⁿ []), with from Fuk'anggan's Chinese name and for "pacified", plus , meaning "hamlet". The origin of the town's current name Checheng is disputed. Some such as Japanese anthropologist
Inō Kanori believe that it arose as a mispronunciation of
Chhâ-siâⁿ (); the pronunciations of and are similar in both Hokkien and Hakka,
chhâ/chhia and
tshài/tshâ respectively. Another theory is that as an aboriginal army approached the town, the inhabitants used dozens of oxcarts carrying charcoal to lined up as a defense. Today, Hokkien-speaking inhabitants continue to pronounce the name of the town with the older
Chhâ-siâⁿ, though the written form is almost inevitably . English-language maps and sources have historically used spellings such as
Chasiang that reflect this pronunciation. ==Geography==