The Shanghai municipal government is progressing a project to
protect the old names of historical places in the city and the
whole list will be published at the end of 2006, Liu Bo, an
official from the city's bureau of urban planning, said?at the
9th conference on city names held on Monday.
Often of profound cultural significance, the name of a place
allows historic culture to pass from one generation to the next. In
a narrow sense these are just location names. But in broad terms
these names contain a great deal of information including the
relationship between the place and people, the origin, background
and historical stories attached to a district. ?
Take Shanghai as an example. Its short names are "Hu" and
"Shen." The original meaning of the word Hu was fishing
tool. This suggests Shanghai people lived on fishing in history.
Shen comes from Lord Chun Shen, a famous high official who
administered Shanghai and its surrounding areas during the Warring
States Period (475-221 BC).
According to Dai Junliang, director of the regional names
division under the Ministry of Civil Affairs, a number of cities
across the country including Beijing, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Shanghai,
Chengdu and Zhengzhou have paid attention to the importance of old
place names and taken measures to protect them.
Beijing, for example, has an ongoing project on the protection
of the names of old hutongs (ancient city alleys or lanes
unique to Beijing). Nanjing, capital of Jiangsu Province, has forwarded an application
for intangible cultural heritage protection for some of its place
names.
A list of Shanghai place names to be protected is currently
being prepared, said Liu Bo. The organization in charge has
entrusted the Horizon Research to make investigations into the
culture of place names at township level in the city.
The place names will be classified into different groups
according to their history: 500, 1,000 and 2,000 years. Current
investigations show that the place name "Huangdu" has been existing
for more than 2,000 years.
Liu also said that the protection list will provide a basis for
keeping the older name when two towns are merged.
(China.org.cn by Xu Lin, November 16, 2006)