EDIT: Yeah ok imgur is purposefully mocking me by changing the quality settings of every single image I upload so whatever, I will upload here.:EDIT
Place names are hard. Place names are also pretty pointless in this case because there's probably like one or two people here who might care about me mangling Chinese.
The difficult comes from myself, because I don't want to reuse real place names from Real China. Taoyuan is meant to exist in a multiverse together with our Earth: it's a recreation, a sanctuary for Chinese mythological fluff. An imperfect, yet more perfect recreation of the world, a merger of Earth and Heaven.
So there's basically two things I can do:
1. Use Chinese mythological places. This is more difficult than it sounds, because it is hard to find good sources on this on the internet beyond some funny PDFs without hanzi and hard-to-verify sources and claims, and Wikipedia, and also because lots of Chinese mythical places are associated with real life places. The more mythological and the more historical/mythological a place is, the more I like to use it (like Kunlun and Buzhou and Fusang), but then there's stuff like the great rivers and mountains that I might like to rename or use an archaic name for.
2. Generate new names. This is relatively simple, if tedious and unimaginative, but you can pretty easily generate Chinese place names by using common toponymic words with something else. The earliest place names I did where the provinces (-> provincial capitals) and the imperial capital: those were colour terms associated with the cardinal directions and geomancy + -zhou or -jing like in Guanzhou (Canton, capital of Guangdong) or Beijing (Northern Capital). Red Provinc(ial Capital), Yellow Capital, etc.
The new stuff you see now is two batches. Western cities that are named after the Kings of the Chinese Underworld (the ten kings in the Taoist version, and I mean version because it's all a hodgepodge of Buddhist and Taoist stuff). I took their names and maybe parts of their titles, and made them place names. There's a king whose title is Chu River King, so there's a city named after Chu River, and the King's name itself became 歷 + 州 Lizhou.
The new cities in Taoyuan proper are named after the Zodiac animals. Pig Country, Dog City, Snake (river) Junction, South of Snake, North of Snake, Dragon Hillock etc. Dragon Gate was an earlier place from myth, where carps who leap through the gates turn into dragons. The myth places it inland at the source of a river, there's a real life place on the southern coast but whatev.
I hope the themed names don't sound too ridiculous. Taoyuan is a place where every person is a shape shifter, and people have animal surnames (though they aren't necessarily their name animal). Most Chinese place-names are pretty pragmatic: [Thing][Place], like Pearl Harbor or [Direction][from][Other Thing Like River] or alternatively various lucky sounding words like Double Fortune or A Lot Of Happiness.
I made zodiac themed names because that's a must-have group, but I'll probably add lots of more animal places, after all, names for those don't run out that fast. Lots of stuff to use.
Reply With Quote