Beijing's Place-Names: From Cosmological Symbolism to Urban-Planner Practicality.

摘要

This is a study of the Chinese city of Beijing in which I use "place names" as a means of understanding the changing geography of the city over its long history. Although place names have been widely studied from across a spectrum of disciplines, a study on the history of the process of naming places in China is still very limited in English literature. Moreover, place naming is not only a historical process but also geographical phenomena. Scholars have for long seemingly ignored the fact that people with different cultural backgrounds, living in different parts of the world, may name their places in different ways. In the USA, Martin Luther King streets may be seen all over the map, yet for all the worshiping of Chairman Mao during the Cultural Revolution, there is not a single street named after him in China. Accordingly, the aim of this study is to discover the character of Chinese place-names by using Beijing as the case.;Beijing's place names are not just to help us find our way, but rich stories that reveal our different ways of understanding the locations. For studying the historical transformation of these understandings, I classify Beijing's place-names into scientific, humanistic and social constructionist ways of naming. In this way, we can classify the complicated and various place names into three intertwined parts: objects and numbers, histories and emotions, politics and ideologies. In details, I see Beijing's place names as chronologically representative of six distinctive understandings of the locations. (1) The cosmological-symbolic: a capital of a "huge unity in Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) (2) The Confucian ideological and urban-planner practical: the capital sat on the border in Ming dynasty (1368-1644); (3) The cosmological-symbolic vs. social-practical: the capital as adapted by Manchu dynasty (Qing dynasty 1644-1912); (4) The half-hearted modern in Republic of China (1912-1949); (5) The People's Republic of China: Marxist-Maoist phase (1950-1976); and (6) The People's Republic of China: post-Marxist, quasi-capitalist, neo-Confucianist phase (1976-present).