Chapter 55 Section 1 Changes in Place Names During the Beiyang Government Period

The Wuchang Uprising, which broke out on October 9, 1911, was a success.The victory of the uprising shocked the whole country. In just 20 days, more than 10 provinces declared independence. In early December 1911, representatives from 17 provinces held a meeting in Nanjing and elected Sun Yat-sen as the president of the provisional government. On January 1, 1912, Sun Yat-sen was sworn in as the first year of the Republic of China.Later, Yuan Shikai stole the fruits of the victory of the 1911 Revolution. After Yuan died, the Northern Warlords continued to rule. This period was called the Republic of China, and of course the political regions also changed accordingly.Therefore, compared with the Qing Dynasty, the two are quite different.

(1) The name of Shuntianfu was abolished in Beijing, the capital, and it was renamed Jingzhao according to the ancient systems of Han and Tang, and its scope was slightly changed.For example, wen'an and dacheng counties were drawn out in the south, and Ninghe county was drawn out in the east, so that Jingzhao was deep in the interior and not near the sea.The northern part of the present-day Xinglong County outside the Great Wall has changed the concave-convex shape of the northern border. (2) Simplify the local government districts, abolish the names of government, prefecture, and department, and implement the provincial and county two-level system.Taking Jiangsu as an example, in the past the province was divided into eight prefectures of Jiangning, Huai'an, Yangzhou, Xuzhou, Songjiang, Suzhou, Changzhou, and Zhenjiang, three Zhili prefectures of Tongzhou, Haizhou, and Taicang, and Zhili Office of Haimen.Now all counties are changed, and the county names adopt the original prefecture or Fuguo county names.When the name of Fuguo county is adopted, if there are two or three Fuguo counties, only one is reserved.For example, when Songjiang Prefecture was renamed Songjiang County, Lou and Huating counties attached to Guo were abolished, and Chuansha Office, which belonged to it, was also changed to Chuansha County, which belonged to the province.Another example is that there are three Fuguo counties in Suzhou Prefecture, namely Wu, Changzhou and Yuanhe. When the county was changed, Wu County was adopted, and the names of Suzhou, Yuanhe and Changzhou were abolished.Another example is that Fuguo County in Xuzhou Prefecture was named Tongshan. After the county was changed, Tongshan was used as the county name. There is no Fuguo County in Zhili Prefecture of Haizhou, so it used the ancient name and was called Donghai County.

(3) Add roads between provinces and counties.Although the two-level system of provinces and counties reduces the level of administrative districts, the rulers feel that the province is large, the population is large, and the number of counties is too large to govern. Provinces with more than 100 counties include Sichuan, Zhili, Henan, Shandong, and Shanxi. Therefore, in the third year of the Republic of China (AD 1914), the level of Taoism was added between provinces and counties. If there are few, a province is divided into three or four, and if there are many, there are five or six. The chief of the Tao is called Yin.In this way, the local division system was changed from the two-level system to the three-level system.Taking Sichuan as an example, the province is divided into five roads, namely Xichuan Road (Dao Yin stationed in Chengdu, the same below), Dongchuan Road (Ba County, now Chongqing), Jianchang Road (Ya'an), Yongning Road (Lu County, now Luzhou City) ), Jialing Road (Langzhong).Another example is that Hubei Province is divided into Jianghan (Wuchang), Xiangyang (Xiangyang), Jingyi (Yichang), and Shihe (Enshi).

(4) Four special areas were set up in the areas where the ethnic minority population is relatively concentrated, namely Suiyuan, Rehe, Chahar and Chuanbian.Its governing offices were Guisui (now Hohhot City), Chengde (now Chengde City), Zhangbei (now the north of the Great Wall of Zhangjiakou City, which is not the same place as Zhangbei County today) and Kangding.Except that there are two roads in the east and west in Sichuan, all other areas have one road.Among them, Chahar District is called Xinghe Road, while Re and Sui Er Districts have the same road name and district name. (5) Select some residential areas as the location of the county seat where the county is to be established, and the office to be established here is called the administrative bureau.Such an institution actually sprouted in the Qing Dynasty.For example, Baoqing and Boli prefectures are proposed to be set up in "Geographical Records of Qing Dynasty History".During the period of the Republic of China, due to the abolition of state-level names, Baoqing and Boli counties were established in Jilin Province at that time (both in Heilongjiang Province today).Another example is that in the second year of Xuantong in the late Qing Dynasty (AD 1910), the Huma Administrative Bureau was tried out, and the Wuxing Administrative Bureau was established in the third year of Xuantong (now Huma County and Duerbert Mongolian Autonomous County respectively).During the period of the Republic of China, there were more than 10 administrative bureaus in Heilongjiang Province. Among them, Tailai, Wangkui, Zhaodong, Tongbei, Luobei, Lindian, Mohe, etc. were changed counties shortly after their establishment; The newly added governance bureaus include Tieli (now Tieli), Jingxing Town (now in Longjiang County), Suidong (now in Suibin), Buxi (now in Nenjiang, Southwest Inner Mongolia) and so on.

During the period of the Republic of my country, effective work was also carried out in promoting the standardization of place names in our country, mainly to adjust domestic place names with duplicate names, and to change some place names that were discriminatory and insulting to ethnic minorities. my country is a country with a long history, a vast territory and a large population. Due to various reasons such as the change of dynasties, personnel changes, and ethnic migration, the complexity of the naming of place names in my country and its evolution has formed since ancient times, and has formed a place with multiple names. And the phenomenon of the same name in different places.These phenomena do not meet the requirements of the standardization of place names, are not convenient for social and economic life, and are likely to cause confusion.This may be the reason. As early as the early years of Tianbao in the Tang Dynasty, 110 place names were changed to "unstable and duplicate names" in our country.This is the earliest place name standardization work in the world, more than 1250 years ago.In the mid-Qing Dynasty, in order to distinguish nearly 60 counties with the same name, the government adopted the method of county seal with the name of the province.At the beginning of the Republic of China, with the abolition of the administrative system of the government, prefecture, and department in the Qing Dynasty, the establishment of counties increased, which further increased the existing phenomenon of duplication of county names, bringing the number of duplication counties to more than 130.For example, there were as many as five Ningyuan counties at that time, which were distributed in five provinces including Suiyuan (now northern Shanxi, central and southern Inner Mongolia), Fengtian (now Liaoning), Hunan, Gansu, and Xinjiang.In order to reform this chaotic situation that was inconvenient for the management of place names and unfavorable for the country's social life and cultural exchanges, in the early years of the Republic of China, a number of counties began to be changed in accordance with the provisions of "The Ministry of the Interior Revises the Names of Counties with the Same Names and the List of Reasons for Retention and Abolishment". Level-duplicate place names (see "Statistical Table of Changes to Duplicate Place Names in the Early Republic of China").