Lamma Island

Lamma Island (Chinese: 南丫島), also known as Pok Liu Chau (Chinese: 博寮洲; pinyin: Bóliáozhōu) or simply Pok Liu (Chinese: 博寮), is the third largest island in Hong Kong (香港). Administratively, it is part of the Islands District.

Name

Lamma Island got named Lamma only because of a chart reading error by Alexander Dalrymple in the 1760s. He had acquired a Portuguese chart to the entrances to the Pearl River and, close to the west of the island, the Portuguese owner had written ‘Lama’. Dalrymple took that to be the name of the island. It wasn’t. It was a Portuguese notation as to the holding (consistency of the seabed from the point of view of anchoring there), which was (and is) mud – in Portuguese ‘lama. In all the early charts the name was spelled with only one ‘m’. So the island acquired a British name by error and one that subsequently got Sinicized by its name being rendered phonetically in characters and everyone forgetting about the original muddle, at some point even more obscured by the addition of the second ‘m’ in the English spelling.