Kai Tak Airport
Kai Tak International Airport was the international airport of Hong Kong from 1925 until 1998. It was known as Hong Kong International Airport from 1954 to 6 July 1998, when it was closed and replaced by the new Hong Kong International Airport at Chek Lap Kok, 30 kilometres to the west, it is known as Hong Kong International Airport, Kai Tak, or Kai Tak, to distinguish it from its successor, referred to as Chek Lap Kok Airport. With numerous skyscrapers and mountains located to the north and its only runway jutting out into Victoria Harbour, landings at the airport were dramatic to experience and technically demanding for pilots; the History Channel program Most Extreme Airports ranked it as the 6th most dangerous airport in the world. The airport was home to Hong Kong's international carrier Cathay Pacific, as well as regional carrier Dragonair, freight airline Air Hong Kong and Hong Kong Airways; the airport was home to the former RAF Kai Tak. Kai Tak was located on the east side of Kowloon Bay in Hong Kong.
The area is surrounded by rugged mountains. Less than 4 km to the north and northeast of the former runway 13 threshold is a range of hills reaching an elevation of 2,000 ft. To the east of the former 31 threshold, the hills are less than 3 km away. To the south of the airport is Victoria Harbour, farther south is Hong Kong Island with hills up to 2,100 ft; when Kai Tak closed, there was only one runway in use, numbered 13/31 and oriented southeast/northwest. The runway was made by reclaiming land from the harbour and was extended several times after its initial construction; the runway was 3,390 m. At the northern end of the runway, buildings rose up to six storeys just across a major multi-lane arterial road; the other three sides of the runway were surrounded by Victoria Harbour. The low-altitude turning manoeuvre before the shortened final approach was so spectacular that passengers could spot television sets in the apartments: "...as the plane banked to the right for landing... the people watching television in the nearby apartments seemed an unsettling arms length away."
The story of Kai Tak started in 1912 when two businessmen Ho Kai and Au Tak formed the Kai Tak Investment Company to reclaim land in Kowloon for development. The land was acquired by the government for use as an airfield. In 1924, Harry Abbott opened The Abbott School of Aviation on that piece of land. Soon, it became a small grass strip runway airport for the RAF and several flying clubs which, over time, grew to include the Hong Kong Flying Club, the Far East Flying Training School, the Aero Club of Hong Kong, which exist today as an amalgamation known as the Hong Kong Aviation Club. In 1928, a concrete slipway was built for seaplanes; the first control tower and hangar at Kai Tak were built in 1935. In 1936, the first domestic airline in Hong Kong was established. Hong Kong fell into the hands of the Japanese in 1941 during World War II. In 1942, the Japanese army expanded Kai Tak, using many Allied prisoner-of-war labourers, building two concrete runways, 13/31 and 07/25. Numerous POW diary entries exist recalling the gruelling work and long hours working on building Kai Tak.
During the process, the historic wall of the Kowloon Walled City and the 45-metre tall Sung Wong Toi, a memorial for the last Song dynasty emperor, were destroyed for materials. A 2001 Environmental Study recommended that a new memorial be erected for the Sung Wong Toi rock and other remnants of the Kowloon area before Kai Tak. From September 1945 to August 1946, the airport was a Royal Navy shore base, "HMS Nabcatcher", the name attached to a Mobile Naval Air Base for the Fleet Air Arm. On 1 April 1947, HMS Flycatcher, was commissioned there. A plan to modify Kai Tak into a modern airport was released in 1954. By 1957, runway 13/31 had been extended to 1,664 metres, while runway 7/25 remained 1,450 metres long. Bristol Britannia 102s took over BOAC's London-Tokyo flights in summer 1957 and were the largest airliners at the time to use the old airport. In 1958, the new NW/SE 2,550-metre long runway extending into Kowloon Bay was completed by land reclamation; the passenger terminal was completed in 1962.
The runway was extended in the mid-1970s to 3,390 metres as the final length. This extension was completed in June 1974, but the full length of the runway was not put into use until 31 December 1975, as construction of the new Airport Tunnel had kept the northwestern end of the runway closed. In 1955 Kai Tak Airport featured in the film The Night My Number Came Up. An Instrument Landing System was installed in 1974 to aid landing on runway 13. Use of the airport under adverse conditions was increased. During the 1970s, an aircraft crash happened and carried out the potential loss of life, which rose the problem of high- density residential developments around the airport though there were no serious accidents at the airport since starting; the growth of Hong Kong put a strain on the airport's capacity. Its usage was close to, for some time exceeded, the designed capacity; the airport was designed to handle 24 million passengers per year, but in 1996, Kai Tak handled 29.5 million passengers, plus 1.56 million tonnes of freight, making it the third busiest airport in the world in terms of international passenger traffic, busiest in terms of international cargo throughput.
Moreover, clearance requirements for aircraft takeoffs and landings made it necessary to limit the height
Japan Asia Airways
Japan Asia Airways, Co. Ltd. is a defunct subsidiary of Japan Airlines which existed between 1975 and 2008. JAA was headquartered in the Japan Airlines Building in Tokyo. JAA was established as a wholly owned subsidiary of JAL on 8 August 1975 and given the responsibility of providing air links between Japan and Taiwan offered by JAL. Direct flights between Japan had been suspended since April 1975, following the signing of a civil air treaty with China. However, following negotiations between the Interchange Association and Taiwan's Association of East Asian Relations, JAA was created and direct flights to Taipei were resumed. JAA began flights to Taipei on September 15, 1975. Similar arrangements were made by Air France, British Airways, KLM, Qantas and Swissair for their services to Taiwan. In 1985 JAA was headquartered in the Yurakucho-Denki Building in Chiyoda, Tokyo, in a facility apart from the JAL headquarters in the Tokyo Building in Chiyoda. Following JAL's privatization, the new 2007 Japan-Taiwan air transport agreement led JAL to liquidate JAA as a cost-saving measure and to normalize Japan-Taiwan flight status.
JAA flew its last flights on March 31, 2008, all flights were operated by JAL from April 1, 2008. Routes served by JAA before being folded into JAL: Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport -- Narita International Airport Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport -- Kansai International Airport Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport -- Chubu Centrair International Airport Kaohsiung International Airport -- Narita International AirportThe above routes were all taken over by JAL on April 1, 2008. JAA offered Taipei -- Okinawa, Taipei -- Hong Kong, Taipei -- Manila routes under the Fifth Freedom traffic rights granted by Taiwan, as well as the connection flights between Taipei and Kaohsiung before the direct Narita—Kaohsiung route was inaugurated in August 2005. JAA was to date the only international carrier to be granted the right to fly in-island by the Civil Aeronautics Administration; the Japan Asia Airways fleet consisted of the following aircraft before its integration to Japan Airlines: 3 Boeing 767-300 2 Boeing 747-300 1 Boeing 747-200 Beginning in 2004, most JAA flights were operated with JAL Boeing 747-400 aircraft to meet market demand and to improve JAL fleet utilization.
JAA operated Douglas DC-8-53/61, Boeing 747-100/200 and McDonnell Douglas DC-10-40 aircraft. Foreign relations of Taiwan#Air links British Asia Airways KLM Asia Australia Asia Airlines Swissair Asia Air France Asie Japan Asia Airways Japan Asia Airways Fleet Detail
Chinese characters
Chinese characters are logograms developed for the writing of Chinese. They have been adapted to write a number of other Asian languages, they remain a key component of the Japanese writing system and are used in the writing of Korean. They were used in Vietnamese and Zhuang. Collectively, they are known as CJK characters. Vietnamese is sometimes included, making the abbreviation CJKV. Chinese characters constitute. By virtue of their widespread current use in East Asia, historic use throughout the Sinosphere, Chinese characters are among the most adopted writing systems in the world by number of users. Chinese characters number in the tens of thousands, though most of them are minor graphic variants encountered only in historical texts. Studies in China have shown that functional literacy in written Chinese requires a knowledge of between three and four thousand characters. In Japan, 2,136 are taught through secondary school. Due to post-WWII simplifications of Kanji in Japan as well as the post-WWII simplifications of characters in China, the Chinese characters used in Japan today are distinct from those used in China in several respects.
There are various national standard lists of characters and pronunciations. Simplified forms of certain characters are used in mainland China and Malaysia. In Japan, common characters are written in post-WWII Japan-specific simplified forms, while uncommon characters are written in Japanese traditional forms, which are identical to Chinese traditional forms. In South Korea, when Chinese characters are used, they are in traditional form identical to those used in Taiwan and Hong Kong where the official writing system is traditional Chinese. Teaching of Chinese characters in South Korea starts in the 7th grade and continues until the 12th grade. In Old Chinese including Classical Chinese, most words were monosyllabic and there was a close correspondence between characters and words. In modern Chinese, the majority of Chinese words today consist of two or more characters. Rather, a character always corresponds to a single syllable, a morpheme. However, there are a few exceptions to this general correspondence, including bisyllabic morphemes, bimorphemic syllables and cases where a single character represents a polysyllabic word or phrase.
Modern Chinese has many homophones. A single character may have a range of meanings, or sometimes quite distinct meanings. Cognates in the several varieties of Chinese are written with the same character, they have similar meanings, but quite different pronunciations. In other languages, most today in Japanese and sometimes in Korean, characters are used to represent Chinese loanwords, to represent native words independently of the Chinese pronunciation, as purely phonetic elements based on their pronunciation in the historical variety of Chinese from which they were acquired; these foreign adaptations of Chinese pronunciation are known as Sino-Xenic pronunciations and have been useful in the reconstruction of Middle Chinese. When the script was first used in the late 2nd millennium BC, words of Old Chinese were monosyllabic, each character denoted a single word. Increasing numbers of polysyllabic words have entered the language from the Western Zhou period to the present day, it is estimated that about 25–30% of the vocabulary of classic texts from the Warring States period was polysyllabic, though these words were used far less than monosyllables, which accounted for 80–90% of occurrences in these texts.
The process has accelerated over the centuries as phonetic change has increased the number of homophones. It has been estimated that over two thirds of the 3,000 most common words in modern Standard Chinese are polysyllables, the vast majority of those being disyllables; the most common process has been to form compounds of existing words, written with the characters of the constituent words. Words have been created by adding affixes and borrowing from other languages. Polysyllabic words are written with one character per syllable. In most cases the character denotes. Many characters have multiple readings, with instances denoting different morphemes, sometimes with different pronunciations. In modern Standard Chinese, one fifth of the 2,400 most common characters have multiple pronunciations. For the 500 most common characters, the proportion rises to 30%; these readings are similar in sound and related in meaning. In the Old Chinese period, affixes could be added to a word to form a new word, written with the same character.
In many cases the pronunciations diverged due to subsequent sound change. For example, many additional readings have the Middle Chinese departing tone, the major sour
Taoyuan International Airport
Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport is an international airport serving Taipei and northern Taiwan. Located about 40 km west of Taipei in Dayuan District, the airport is Taiwan's largest and busiest airport, it is one of five Taiwanese airports with regular international flights, is operated by the Taoyuan International Airport Corporation. In 2016, it was ranked the best airport for its size in the Asia-Pacific region by Airports Council International; the airport opened for commercial operations in 1979 and is an important regional trans-shipment center, passenger hub, gateway for destinations in Asia. Known as Chiang Kai-shek International Airport, it was renamed on 6 September 2006 to its current name, it is one of two. Songshan now serves chartered flights, intra-island flights, limited international flights. In 2016, Taiwan Taoyuan handled a record 42.3 million passengers and 2.1 billion kg of freight, making it the 10th busiest airport worldwide by international passenger traffic, 6th busiest in terms of international freight traffic in 2015.
It is the main international hub for EVA Air. It is a hub of Uni Air and the LCC Tigerair Taiwan; the airport planned as Taoyuan International Airport, bore the name of late President Chiang Kai-shek until 2006. In Chinese, its former name was "Chung-Cheng International Airport", where Chung-Cheng is the legal given name that Chiang Kai-shek had used since the 1910s. In Taiwan, Chiang Kai-shek is associated with the Chinese Nationalist Party or Kuomintang and its many years of one-party authoritarian rule. Local officials in Taoyuan City and members of the Pan-Green Coalition referred to the hub by the name associated with it: "Taoyuan International Airport". News organizations and local residents sometimes combined the two used names as "Taoyuan Chung-Cheng Airport."The Executive Yuan of then-President Chen Shui-bian's administration approved the name Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport for the hub on 6 September 2006. The opposition Kuomintang, which together with its political allies held a one-vote majority in the Legislative Yuan, decried the change and proposed "Taiwan Taoyuan Chiang Kai-shek International Airport" instead.
The disagreement, like those affecting the names of the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall and other landmarks in Taiwan, stands as another manifestation of the trend known as Taiwan localization among pan-Green officials and desinicization by Pan-Blue Coalition. The media in mainland China has always referred to the airport as "Taoyuan International Airport" so as to avoid mentioning Chiang Kai-shek. In the 1970s, the original airport in Taipei City — Taipei Songshan Airport — had become overcrowded and could not be expanded due to space limitations. Thus, a new airport was planned to alleviate congestion; the new airport opened on 26 February 1979, as part of the Ten Major Construction Projects pursued by the government in the 1970s. The airport was planned under the name Taoyuan International Airport but was changed to Chiang Kai-shek International Airport in memory of former President Chiang Kai-shek; the airport is the main hub of China Airlines, the Republic of China's flag carrier, as well as EVA Air, a private airline established in 1989.
Overcrowding of the airport in recent years prompted the construction of Terminal 2, opened on 29 July 2000, with half of its gates operational. The remaining gates opened on 21 January 2005 for China Airlines, making China Airlines the only airline to operate from both terminals; the airport has announced construction plans for a third terminal. In October 2015, the design of British firm Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, founded by Pritzker Architecture Prize-laureate Richard Rogers, was chosen for the 640,000 square meter Terminal 3. Over US$2.3 billion will be poured into the project, among the most costly constructions in modern Taiwanese history. The terminal is expected to be opened in 2020 and accommodate 45 million passengers per year, boosting the yearly capacity of the airport to 86 million passengers. Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport has two terminals, which are connected by two, short people movers; the third and fourth terminals are planned, the Taoyuan Airport MRT links the terminals together underground, provides transportation to Taipei City.
Terminal 1 is the original passenger terminal of the Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport. The building was designed by Chinese-born, Taiwanese-American structural engineer Tung-Yen Lin and is based on the main terminal of Washington Dulles International Airport; the five-storey, 169,500 m2 terminal, along with the airport, opened in 1979 to relieve the overcrowded Taipei Songshan Airport. All international flights were moved to the airport following the completion of this terminal. Terminal 1 featured 22 gates. A row of 11 gates are located on the north end of the airfield facing the north runway and another row of 11 gates are located on the south end airfield facing the south runway; the two concourses that contained the airplane gates are linked together by a main building that contained the check-in areas, baggage claim, passport immigration areas, security checkpoint areas. Together they form a giant "H". All gates are equipped with jetways. Gates located at the end of the concourses have one jetway and reducing people and gates not located at the end of the concourses have two jetways.
The terminal used to be white in color when it first opened. As the years
Taiwan
Taiwan the Republic of China, is a state in East Asia. Neighbouring states include the People's Republic of China to the west, Japan to the northeast, the Philippines to the south. Taiwan is the most populous state and largest economy, not a member of the United Nations; the island of Taiwan was inhabited by indigenous peoples for thousands of years before the 17th century, when Dutch colonialists opened the island to mass Han immigration. After a brief rule by the Kingdom of Tungning, the island was annexed in 1683 by the Qing dynasty of China, ceded to Japan in 1895. Following the surrender of Japan in 1945, the Republic of China, which had overthrown and succeeded the Qing in 1911, took control of Taiwan; the resumption of the Chinese Civil War led to the loss of the mainland to the Communists and the flight of the ROC government to Taiwan in 1949. Although the ROC government continued to claim to be the legitimate representative of China, since 1950 its effective jurisdiction has been limited to Taiwan and several small islands.
In the early 1960s, Taiwan entered a period of industrialisation. In the 1980s and early 1990s, it changed from a one-party military dictatorship to a multi-party democracy with a semi-presidential system; as a founding member, the ROC represented China in the UN until it was replaced by the PRC in 1971. The PRC has claimed sovereignty over Taiwan and refused diplomatic relations with any country that recognises the ROC; as of 2019, Taiwan maintains official ties with 16 out of 193 UN member states. Most international organisations in which the PRC participates either refuse to grant membership to Taiwan or allow it to participate only as a non-state actor. Most major powers maintain unofficial ties with Taiwan through representative offices and institutions that function as de facto embassies and consulates. In Taiwan, the major political division is between parties favouring eventual Chinese unification and promoting a Chinese identity contrasted with those aspiring to independence and promoting a Taiwanese identity, though both sides have moderated their positions to broaden their appeal.
Taiwan is a high-income advanced economy, with a skilled and educated workforce. It has the 22nd-largest economy in the world, its high-tech industry plays a key role in the global economy, it is urbanised, is one of the most densely populated countries in the world, with most of the population concentrated on the western coast. The state is ranked in terms of civil and political liberties, health care and human development. Various names for the island of Taiwan remain in use today, each derived from explorers or rulers during a particular historical period; the name Formosa dates from 1542, when Portuguese sailors sighted an uncharted island and noted it on their maps as Ilha Formosa. The name Formosa "replaced all others in European literature" and remained in common use among English speakers into the 20th century. In the early 17th century, the Dutch East India Company established a commercial post at Fort Zeelandia on a coastal sandbar called "Tayouan", after their ethnonym for a nearby Taiwanese aboriginal tribe Taivoan people, written by the Dutch and Portuguese variously as Taiouwang, Teijoan, etc.
This name was adopted into the Chinese vernacular as the name of the sandbar and nearby area. The modern word "Taiwan" is derived from this usage, seen in various forms in Chinese historical records; the area occupied by modern-day Tainan represented the first permanent settlement by both European colonists and Chinese immigrants. The settlement grew to be the island's most important trading centre and served as its capital until 1887. Use of the current Chinese name became official as early as 1684 with the establishment of Taiwan Prefecture. Through its rapid development the entire Formosan mainland became known as "Taiwan". In his Daoyi Zhilüe, Wang Dayuan used "Liuqiu" as a name for the island of Taiwan, or the part of it closest to Penghu. Elsewhere, the name was used for the Ryukyu Islands in general or Okinawa, the largest of them; the name appears in the Book of Sui and other early works, but scholars cannot agree on whether these references are to the Ryukyus, Taiwan or Luzon. The official name of the state is the "Republic of China".
Shortly after the ROC's establishment in 1912, while it was still located on the Chinese mainland, the government used the short form "China" to refer to itself, which derives from zhōng and guó, a term which developed under the Zhou dynasty in reference to its royal demesne, the name was applied to the area around Luoyi during the Eastern Zhou and to China's Central Plain before being used as an occasional synonym for the state during the Qing era. During the 1950s and 1960s, after the government had withdrawn to Taiwan upon losing the Chinese Civil War, it was referred to as "Nationalist China" to differentiate it from "Communist China", it was a member of the United Nations representing "China" until 1971, when it lost its seat to the People's Republic of China. Over subsequent decades, the Republic of China has become known as "Taiwan", after the island that comprises 99% of the territory under its control. In some contexts ROC government publications, the name is written as "
Airline codes
This is a list of airline codes. The table lists IATA's two-character airline designators, ICAO's three-character airline designators and the airline call signs. Historical assignments are included. IATA airline designators, sometimes called IATA reservation codes, are two-character codes assigned by the International Air Transport Association to the world's airlines; the standard is described in IATA's Standard Schedules Information Manual and the codes themselves are described in IATA's Airline Coding Directory. The IATA codes based on the ICAO designators which were issued in 1947 as two-letter airline identification codes. IATA expanded the two-letter-system with codes consisting of a letter and a digit after ICAO had introduced its current 3-letter-system in 1982; until only combinations of letters were used. Airline designator codes follow the format xx, i.e. two alphanumeric characters followed by an optional letter. Although the IATA standard provides for three-character airline designators, IATA has not used the optional third character in any assigned code.
This is because some legacy computer systems the "central reservations systems", have failed to comply with the standard, notwithstanding the fact that it has been in place for 20 years. The codes issued to date comply with IATA Resolution 762; these codes thus comply with the current airline designator standard, but use only a limited subset of its possible range. There are three types of designator: numeric/alpha and controlled duplicate. IATA airline designators are used to identify an airline for commercial purposes in reservations, tickets, air waybills and in telecommunications. A flight designator is the concatenation of the airline designator, xx, the numeric flight number, n, plus an optional one-letter "operational suffix". Therefore, the full format of a flight designator is xxn. After an airline is delisted, IATA can make the code available for reuse after six months and can issue "controlled duplicates". Controlled duplicates are issued to regional airlines whose destinations are not to overlap, so that the same code is shared by two airlines.
The controlled duplicate is denoted here, in IATA literature, with an asterisk. An example of this is the code "7Y", which refers to both Mid Airlines, a charter airline in Sudan, Med Airways, a charter airline in Lebanon. IATA issues an accounting or prefix code; this number is used on tickets as the first three characters of the ticket number. The ICAO airline designator is a code assigned by the International Civil Aviation Organization to aircraft operating agencies, aeronautical authorities, services related to international aviation, each of whom is allocated both a three-letter designator and a telephony designator; these codes are unique by airline, unlike the IATA airline designator codes. The designators are listed in ICAO Document 8585: Designators for Aircraft Operating Agencies, Aeronautical Authorities and Services. ICAO codes have been issued since 1947; the ICAO codes were based on a two-letter-system and were identical to the airline codes used by IATA. After an airline joined IATA its existing ICAO-two-letter-code was taken over as IATA code.
Because both organizations used the same code system, the current terms ICAO code and IATA code did not exist until the 1980s. They were called two-letter-airline-designators. At this time it was impossible to find out whether an airline was an IATA member or not just by looking at its code. In the 1970s the abbreviation BA was the ICAO code and the IATA code of British Airways while non-IATA-members like Court Line used their 2-letter-abbreviation as ICAO code only. In 1982 ICAO introduced the current three-letter-system due to the increasing number of airlines. After a transitional period of five years it became the official new ICAO standard system in November 1987 while IATA kept the older 2-letter-system, introduced by ICAO in 1947. Certain combinations of letters, for example SOS, are not allocated to avoid confusion with other systems. Other designators those starting with Y and Z, are reserved for government organizations; the designator YYY is used for operators. An example is: Operator: American Airlines Three-letter designator: AAL Telephony designator: AMERICANA timeline of the airline designators used by American Airlines: Most airlines employ a call sign, spoken during airband radio transmissions.
As by ICAO Annex 10 chapter 5.2.1.7.2.1 a call sign shall be one of the following types: Type A: the characters corresponding to the registration marking of the aircraft. Type B: the telephony designator of the aircraft operating agency, followed by the last four characters of the registration marking of the aircraft. Type C: the telephony designator of the aircraft operating agency, followed by the flight identification; the one most used within commercial aviation is type C. The flight identification is often the same as the flight number, though this is not always the case. In case of call sign confusion a different flight identification can be chosen, but the flight number will remain the same. Call sign confusion happens when two or more flights with similar flight numbers fly close to each other, e.g. KLM 645 and KLM 649 or Speedbird 446 and Speedbird 664; the flight number is published in an airline's public timetable and appears on the arrivals and departure scr
London
London is the capital and largest city of both England and the United Kingdom. Standing on the River Thames in the south-east of England, at the head of its 50-mile estuary leading to the North Sea, London has been a major settlement for two millennia. Londinium was founded by the Romans; the City of London, London's ancient core − an area of just 1.12 square miles and colloquially known as the Square Mile − retains boundaries that follow its medieval limits. The City of Westminster is an Inner London borough holding city status. Greater London is governed by the Mayor of the London Assembly. London is considered to be one of the world's most important global cities and has been termed the world's most powerful, most desirable, most influential, most visited, most expensive, sustainable, most investment friendly, most popular for work, the most vegetarian friendly city in the world. London exerts a considerable impact upon the arts, education, fashion, healthcare, professional services and development, tourism and transportation.
London ranks 26 out of 300 major cities for economic performance. It is one of the largest financial centres and has either the fifth or sixth largest metropolitan area GDP, it is the most-visited city as measured by international arrivals and has the busiest city airport system as measured by passenger traffic. It is the leading investment destination, hosting more international retailers and ultra high-net-worth individuals than any other city. London's universities form the largest concentration of higher education institutes in Europe. In 2012, London became the first city to have hosted three modern Summer Olympic Games. London has a diverse range of people and cultures, more than 300 languages are spoken in the region, its estimated mid-2016 municipal population was 8,787,892, the most populous of any city in the European Union and accounting for 13.4% of the UK population. London's urban area is the second most populous in the EU, after Paris, with 9,787,426 inhabitants at the 2011 census.
The population within the London commuter belt is the most populous in the EU with 14,040,163 inhabitants in 2016. London was the world's most populous city from c. 1831 to 1925. London contains four World Heritage Sites: the Tower of London. Other landmarks include Buckingham Palace, the London Eye, Piccadilly Circus, St Paul's Cathedral, Tower Bridge, Trafalgar Square and The Shard. London has numerous museums, galleries and sporting events; these include the British Museum, National Gallery, Natural History Museum, Tate Modern, British Library and West End theatres. The London Underground is the oldest underground railway network in the world. "London" is an ancient name, attested in the first century AD in the Latinised form Londinium. Over the years, the name has attracted many mythicising explanations; the earliest attested appears in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, written around 1136. This had it that the name originated from a supposed King Lud, who had taken over the city and named it Kaerlud.
Modern scientific analyses of the name must account for the origins of the different forms found in early sources Latin, Old English, Welsh, with reference to the known developments over time of sounds in those different languages. It is agreed; this was adapted into Latin as Londinium and borrowed into Old English, the ancestor-language of English. The toponymy of the Common Brythonic form is much debated. A prominent explanation was Richard Coates's 1998 argument that the name derived from pre-Celtic Old European *lowonida, meaning "river too wide to ford". Coates suggested that this was a name given to the part of the River Thames which flows through London. However, most work has accepted a Celtic origin for the name, recent studies have favoured an explanation along the lines of a Celtic derivative of a proto-Indo-European root *lendh-, combined with the Celtic suffix *-injo- or *-onjo-. Peter Schrijver has suggested, on these grounds, that the name meant'place that floods'; until 1889, the name "London" applied to the City of London, but since it has referred to the County of London and Greater London.
"London" is sometimes written informally as "LDN". In 1993, the remains of a Bronze Age bridge were found on the south foreshore, upstream of Vauxhall Bridge; this bridge either reached a now lost island in it. Two of those timbers were radiocarbon dated to between 1750 BC and 1285 BC. In 2010 the foundations of a large timber structure, dated to between 4800 BC and 4500 BC, were found on the Thames's south foreshore, downstream of Vauxhall Bridge; the function of the mesolithic structure is not known. Both structures are on the south bank. Although there is evidence of scattered Brythonic settlements in the area, the first major settlement was founded by the Romans about four years after the invasion
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