Place names embody cultural traditions and memories
The origin of place names comes from the process of people’s understanding and transformation of nature, a reflection of people’s cognition of nature and society. A place is truly born when it is given its own name. As spatiotemporal symbols spanning the long river of history, place names gather human wisdom, containing historical, geographical and humanistic information of various periods, and they constitute unique communications of culture. It is the different cultural connotations embodied in the place names of different regions that become people’s different life memories, thus making the names the objects of nostalgic recollections. The ancients said, “The homeland is hard to leave.” However, in order to survive, to study or to work, many have to leave home or migrate for a short or long period of time. The most typical symbol that triggers one’s memory of home is the name of the hometown.
I have been working at the grassroots level on the Zhoushan Islands for 30 years. When I started my work years ago, the cross-strait postal communication between Taiwan and the Chinese mainland had just begun. At that time, a large number of letters in search of family sent by veterans who went to Taiwan were overflowing the post office’s dispatch room because of wrong place names on the envelopes. The main reason for the backlog of these letters was the veterans’ low literacy. Their letters are mostly written by others according to their oral account—that is why there were differences between the place names on the envelopes and the true names of places.
However, if we translate the words on the envelope into the related local dialect, we can basically find out the corresponding correct place names. It can be seen that even decades after illiterate veterans left their hometowns, the names of their hometowns were still engraved in their minds. The name is the most important clue according to which they keep and prolong their cultural roots. Since then, I have helped a large number of villagers in the Zhoushan Islands find out their origins in the mainland through comparing the similarity of geographical names.
The name of a place may be derived from the most typical natural features of the place, or from major historical events, or from the local anthropological characteristics, such as customs of living, spiritual pursuits, aspirations and hopes. People’s perception of all aspects of nature and society from all angles are likely to be projected into ordinary place names. Many place names in China, being time-honored and novel, have not changed over many years of being handed down. They have become the “living fossils” of local places. Some others have evolved one way or another with the change of the times. The thread of these evolutions can constitute a vivid textbook of history.
In terms of the recent popular TV program Conference on Chinese Place Names aired on CCTV, the biggest difficulty lies in how to transform complex academic issues into plain, easy-to-understand culture to be enjoyed by all. The question bank group of the program has brought together erudite experts from famous universities of China and gathered those experienced in toponymy at all levels. Some of them make hard things simple and some chew on words. Through continuous collision between various disciplines and fields, question banks and stories about names of places across the country are presented, involving history, geography, language, folklore as well as food, clothing, housing and transportation. The purpose is to interpret and appreciate the figures, cultures, life and emotion behind place names.
The essence of the Conference on Chinese Place Names is the presence of a cultural China and an emotional China—a country that can look back on history, continue its traditions, reflect on the present and look forward to the future.
This article was edited and translated from Guangming Daily. Wang Jianfu is an expert from the Toponymic Culture of Place Names of the Zhoushan Islands Office under the Society of Toponymy of Zhoushan, Zhejiang Province.
edited by BAI LE