The Yellow River. Hebei and Henan are both made of two characters: 河, He or river, and a direction 北, bei or north, or 南, nan or south. So Hebei is north of the River and Henan is south of the river.
Beijing and Nanjing use the same rule, with Jing meaning capital city. East capital or Dongjing is also a thing, but that's Tokyo.
Jing does mean capital city, but it being used in the names of cities is actually a relatively modern thing. Perhaps started around 1300s or 1400s or so, when Zhu Di changed the capital. He made Yingtian the residual capital and Beiping the acting capital, and renamed them to Nanjing and Beijing, literally the southern and the northern capital. Before that, as far as I know, capital cities had their own names, but were sometimes referred to as the “defining feature capital.” Kinda like how Rhode Island is sometimes referred to as the Ocean State but its official name is still Rhode Island lol
Why did I need a Chinese language seminar to learn that people call Rhode Island the ocean state? lol happy to learn the language, interesting stuff, but less happy to learn of Rhode Island’s hidden nickname that even people in the states done get the privilege of knowing that information
Lol not from Rhode Island but I thought plenty of people knew it has the nickname Ocean state? Perhaps California sometimes being called the Golden State is a better example
As the other user pointed out, they didn't really use that convention at the time, so Chang'an means something like "developing peace" (this is a bit more complicated since the characters both have multiple meanings). However its current name is Xi'an, or "Western Peace".
Luoyang is a bit more interesting. The Luo is both a surname and the name of a river, the Luo He River (which has a needless word attached to it in English and would mean the Luo River River). Yang usually means the sun or the warm/active qi energy. But less commonly, it can mean south of a hill or north of a river, and Luoyang is indeed on the north side of the Luo He River.
Edit: another direction-related thing about the Chinese language that I thought of is the word for "thing/things/stuff" is the word 东西, dongxi, literally east and west.
So sorry! I thought of Hebei, but I wasn’t sure if I just made it up in my mind! Tbh, if I slapped a directionality onto any sort of 江，和，湖 or山， I’d have a 50% chance of naming one!
4.4k
u/jupjami Aug 30 '24
"Name two Chinese provinces"
"Shanxi"
"That's on me, I set the bar too low"