The town was formerly called Haikou (, meaning "seaport" or "river mouth"), a direct toponym describing the town's location at the end of the
Huwei River where the river empties into the ocean. In 1941, the town was renamed Taixi. The reason for this name change was due to a perceived national shortcoming: in Taiwan, there existed four cities called
Taipei (, literally "Taiwan-North"),
Taichung (, "Taiwan-Middle"),
Taitung (, "Taiwan-East"), and
Tainan (, "Taiwan-South"), but there was no place called Taixi (, "Taiwan-West"). To fill this gap in Taiwan's place naming system, the town, which is located at the approximate middle of Taiwan's west coast, was renamed Taixi. Taixi was first settled by
Han Chinese in the
Kangxi era of the
Qing Dynasty and gradually flourished through the reigns of the
Yongzheng Emperor and the
Qianlong Emperor. Families from
Zhangzhou and
Quanzhou with the typical
Fukienese surnames Chen (), Chang (), Wu (), Lin (), and Ting () cultivated the land and built a port. The port brought great prosperity to the town, and by the reign of the
Qianlong Emperor, the town was thriving. Unfortunately, in 1898 a powerful storm hit the area, bringing floods and torrential rain which washed debris and silt from the nearby mountains down to the mouth of the river and the port. Almost overnight, the port was silted up, and Taixi was reduced to the small and relatively impoverished town that it is today. Taixi's coastal waters were traditionally used in
oyster farming, but in 1991 they were
zoned for offshore industrial use. ==Demographics==