Geographical names are the names of features or regions that human beings decide to facilitate their own production and life.The so-called land features include not only natural objects such as mountains, ridges, rivers, lakes, and seas, but also some artificial objects built and used by humans, such as canals, roads, villages, towns, and mines.Territory refers to areas of different sizes and types composed of various natural objects and artificial objects, including administrative regions, natural regions, forest belts, fisheries, factories, farms, etc.The areas represented by these place names are living or working places that people often come into contact with, even for a moment.Therefore, as soon as place names appeared, they formed an indissoluble bond with human social life.With the progress of society and the development of production, people's contacts and exchanges are becoming more and more frequent and constantly strengthened, and the use of place names is also becoming more and more extensive. It involves many departments such as industry, agriculture, transportation, trade, civil affairs, foreign affairs and national defense. ; On the other hand, in the process of using place names, the place names themselves are constantly evolving.This evolution includes not only changes in the location of place names, but also the meaning of place names, the characteristics of words, and the change of place names over time.Therefore, the study of place names has become an important work to meet the needs of the times and social requirements.

my country is a country with a long history, a vast territory and a large population. Not only does it use the top place names in the world, but it also has a large number of place names used in history, which is unmatched by any other country. A place name generally consists of two parts, namely the general name and the proper name.The so-called general names are the names of mountains, rivers, rivers, lakes, counties, counties, provinces, and districts, showing the category of place names.Proper names are the special names of place names in a certain category. Some people compare common names to people's surnames, and proper names to people's first names.It is customary to write a letter addressed to Bengbu City, Anhui Province as Anhui Bengbu, but it is not appropriate to write a letter addressed to Datong City, Shanxi Province as Shanxi Datong, because in addition to Datong City, there is also a Datong County in Yanbei area. Writing Datong will cause postal difficulties.So this generic name cannot be omitted.General names are sometimes transformed into proper names. For example, Zhejiang is the name of a river, Zhejiang is a proper name, and Jiang is a general name. However, in the place name of Zhejiang Province, the province is a general name, and Jiang is a part of the proper name.Another example is that among the two place names Shashi and Jinshi, the latter city character is a general name, and the former city character is also a part of the proper name.At present, in some county-level cities established in my country, such as Wanxian City and Daxian City, the county characters are also transformed from general names into proper names.

Most of the large and small place names in our country have a long history. This is because after 1949, the old place names that may or may not be changed will not be changed.Taking county names as an example, the eight counties under the jurisdiction of Beijing and Fangshan, which was transformed from a county to a district, all have a long history, among which Changping and Pinggu can be traced back to the Han Dynasty.The nine municipal counties in Shanghai were also established before 1949, so they are both current place names and historical place names.The so-called historical place names should be bounded by 1949. Place names before 1949 are also called old place names, and those that have been changed after 1949 can be called former names, which is more appropriate.

Our country is a multi-ethnic country.Although the number of brother nationalities other than the Han nationality is small, the distribution areas are quite large. The languages ​​of these ethnic areas are also quite complex. Some place names may be the remnants of older ethnic names. In addition, Chinese has also changed from ancient to modern, and there will be many Chinese translations. Therefore, the work of exploring these place names is very arduous, and it requires historians, ethnologists, linguists and place names workers to work together to undertake this arduous task. Our country has a long history, and the feudal society lasted for a long time.In the process of changing dynasties, the change of place names is more complicated due to changing names, changing emperors and avoiding taboos.During the split period, there will be more chaos in one place or more than one place.Taking Xuzhou as an example, if you add location words such as east, west, south, and north, there can be as many as dozens of places, and there will be South Xuzhou in the north of North Xuzhou.Similar to this, East Yuzhou is set to the west of Yuzhou.This chaos is elusive.If you are not careful, you will make mistakes.

Place names are linguistic vocabulary, which have three aspects of sound, shape and meaning in written language.Objectively, the content of "bit" is also very important. Of course, the content of bit can also be included in the content of meaning.However, if the specific location is not determined when explaining the place name, it is often regarded as missing the point. It can be seen that the location is still necessary to be listed separately in addition to the sound, shape, and meaning.In the past dynasties of our country, there are quite a lot of similar names and even similar meanings. If you don't use the position to distinguish them, it will be very easy to confuse.Not to mention far away, taking the administrative district in the 25th year of Jiaqing in the Qing Dynasty (1820 A.D.) as an example, there were four Xincheng counties coexisting at the same time: 1. Zhili (now Hebei) Xincheng County, where the seat of government is now Xincheng A new town in the southeast of the county. 2. Xincheng County, Zhejiang Province, the county seat is Xindeng in the southwest of Fuyang County. 3. Xincheng County, Jiangxi Province (now Lichuan County). 4. Xincheng County, Shandong Province, where the government is located in the west of Huantai County today.If you add the Xincheng counties established before or after the Qing Dynasty, you can list a lot of them. If you don’t use digits to distinguish them, you will be entangled. Therefore, it is still necessary to use digits as an element to distinguish place names.

The exploration of meaning is also complex. Some cities and counties newly established after 1949, such as Daqing City in Heilongjiang Province, Dongying City in Shandong Province, and Zuoquan, Jingyu, Shangzhi, Zhidan and other counties established to commemorate the revolutionary martyrs, are well known to all.Among the ancient place names, the predecessors have also explained it clearly. For example, Wenxi in Shanxi and Huojia in Henan are newly established counties after Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty heard the news of the pacification of Nanyue and the capture of Lu Jia during his tour.There are also some administrative districts named after some mountains, rivers, lakes, seas, etc., which are easier to understand, but many are not explained by the ancients or are still controversial and unconcluded.For example, there are several theories about Chibi in the Battle of Chibi, even referring to Chibi (Chibiji), which Su Dongpo wrote as a fu, and the so-called "Wen Chibi" and "Wu Chibi" appeared.The interpretation of place names cannot be taken literally. This is what Shen Kuo of the Song Dynasty said, "Baixue in Yingdu is mistaken for Yingzhou. Ershu in the East China Sea is mistaken for Haizhou (southwest of today's Lianyungang City)." Not many people in Yingdu can sing.Yingdu is located at the site of Jinan City in Jiangling County, Hubei Province today, while Yingzhou in Song Dynasty is located in Zhongxiang County, Hubei Province today, which is not the same place as Yingdu.Er Shu refers to Shu Guang and Shu Shou, scholars of the Han Dynasty. Their uncle and nephew were from Lanling County, Donghai County (in the southeast of Shandong Province today). A scholar in the Song Dynasty discovered two ancient tombs in Haizhou, which he believed to be the tomb of Er Shu. , These are all errors of confusing different ancient place names.

In place names, the complexity of glyphs has caused people many difficulties. After 1949, relevant departments have simplified some rare and traditional characters, for example: Shanxi County, (Yunqian) County, Liquan County, Binxian County, Yunxian County, Mianxian County, and Siyang simplified as: Zhouzhi , Huxian, Liquan, Binxian, Fuxian, Mianxian, Qianyang.Another example is that the 亹 [menmen] source in Qinghai is simplified as Menyuan, and the Yudu in Jiangxi is simplified as Yudu et al.But when looking through ancient books, it is inevitable to encounter them.In addition, there are many variant characters in ancient books, some commonly used traditional characters are indeed complex enough, and some characters do not have many strokes, such as Mo [mo Mo] and Mo [mei Mei], Si [si Si] and Pan [ Fan Fan] are both water names, and the two characters are almost the same, but it is difficult to distinguish them.

In Chinese, the pronunciation of place names is often related to the shape of the characters. The so-called unknown characters often refer to those who do not know the shape, and of course it is difficult to pronounce the sound. This is the case for some of the above-mentioned uncommon place names before simplification.However, there are also some common characters that are not pronounced according to the usual pronunciation when they are used as place names, which is indeed worth noting.For example: the Taiwanese reading [taitai] in Tiantai County and Tiantai Mountain in Zhejiang Province, the Dongzi reading [tongtong] in Hongdong County in Shanxi Province, the lead reading [yanyan] in Qianshan County in Jiangxi Province, and the reading in Panyu, a county under Guangzhou City Fandu [pan Pan], fanta [po Po] in Fanta, Kaifeng City, Henan, etc., these may be related to the survival of ancient sounds.There are also some place names with multiple pronunciations of one word. For example, some of the characters for Bao are pronounced [baobao], some are pronounced [bubu], and some are pronounced [pupu].The Pu character in Huangpu, Guangdong is pronounced [pupu], and the Pu character in Da Po is pronounced [bubu].After the place names with market characters in Guangdong and Guangxi were simplified to Wei [xuxu], they were confused with the characters with Wei characters in the place names with Wei characters in Jianghuai area.In our ancient civilization, the complexity of place name issues may also rank first in the world.

Although there are differences in the size of place names, for place name workers, even if it is a small place name, the understanding must be correct, otherwise it will cause great losses. For example, there is a railway station in Xinjiang and a new building in Liaoning. A train station with the same name as the train station in Shenyang, a truckload of leather equipment sent to this new station by a factory in Shenyang, was sent to Xinjiang by mistake, and after being discovered, it was transported back to Liaoning from Xinjiang. Just imagine what a big loss this must be.Another example is that a ship ran aground on the sea and sent a signal for help, but the rescuer could not find out the name of the accident site, so how to rescue it.

This book is all about the formation and evolution of some important place names in history.