Quick memory of road names

This was based on a plan for road naming by the National Government at that time. It had no special direction. Most of the main roads used the names of major provinces and cities.

These road names have not changed much since liberation.

After liberation, the new regime wanted to change the road names in Shanghai. This is how a large number of national place names and road names appeared. Of course, some of the original road names were retained. --For example, Zhonghua Road is the original road name.

Generally speaking, the place names of roads in Shanghai are roughly the same as the general directions of provinces across the country. For example, the northeastern provinces of my country are in the northeast, which is reflected in the place names of Shanghai, which are also in the northeast of Shanghai. Songhuajiang Road, Anshan Road, etc., in Yangpu District - the northeastern district of Shanghai.

The naming rules for place names in Shanghai are that vertically (north-south) is the name of the province, and horizontally (east-west) is the name of the city, region, and county below the province, such as Nanjing Road, Jiujiang Road , Hankou Road, Fuzhou Road, Yan'an Road, etc. are horizontal; while Sichuan Road, Jiangxi Road, Henan Road, Fujian Road, Zhejiang Road, Guizhou Road, Guangxi Road, Tibet Road, etc. - vertical. Of course, there are exceptions, such as Guangdong Road, which is the name of the province, but it is horizontal.

The subsequent application of this rule is basically like this, and there may be more exceptions. For example, Chengdu Road is vertical, but according to the rules it should be used in horizontal road names.

Shanghai: Interpretation of the city by road names

□ Photo by Shen Ying, our reporter in Shanghai, Li Jiangsong

"Private Memory Archives"

A familiar place name often forms a sea of ??memory, and place names, like coral reefs, preserve an intricate secret. There is a tacit understanding between people and place names.

Some of them are ironic. Zhou Zexiong wrote in his Shanghai memoirs: "Although it was a good sign that my first love started on Huaxi Road, it was on Triumph Road that I fell into the Waterloo of love. Another time, when I thought I was already perfect When we carelessly moved our love from Wuning Road to Fumin Road, and then from Xiangyang Park in the city center to the remote Linjiang Park, we almost had a fight with her on a road called "Togetherness". ”

Place names have their own symbolic meaning, but this meaning cannot be circulated and collectively accepted like the RMB, that is, it cannot be literal, it belongs to you. , and you may not be able to express it to others.

Ms. Qiu’s home is a small bungalow on the roadside in Sichuan, although it is shared with six families. Graduated from the famous Fuxing Middle School, at the top of Sichuan North Road. Every inch of asphalt and cement on this road has witnessed her youth before she was 20 years old. In her words: "I know what is sold at every counter in every store on this street."

But her territory has changed dramatically. Every time Ms. Qiu returns to her parents' home and walks around Sichuan Road, she will find something different. When she said this, the corners of her eyes couldn't help but turn up, as if she were a queen talking about the careless gardener in the back garden who didn't prune it according to her wishes, and the result was "a mess."

She was once the well-deserved master of this road, at least one of the masters. Her husband, Mr. Zhou, is not. He was born on Hailar Road, not far from Sichuan Road. There is another road between the two roads called Siping Road. In the densely populated Hongkou District, Siping Road was once a dividing line. To the east were the shanty towns of Hailar Road and other places, dominated by people from Northern Jiangsu, and to the west were descendants of Cantonese people such as Sichuan North Road and Ouyang Road. In the days when Shanghai was relatively closed after 1949, there were two blocks on both sides of Siping Road, which were also two classes. Mr. Zhou worked hard to open up the two blocks.

Mr. Zhou returned to Hailar Road before the Chinese New Year and saw that the shanty town he loved and hated had been demolished. This has become a new residential area, with the average price reaching 7,000 yuan per square meter. He said he felt "choked all of a sudden" and could only park the car and smoke for a long time.

Everyone has a private archive of place names, and various place names have been filed separately by them in their own way.

Key in the city’s historical password

For a city, place names are like a set of passwords. Only by understanding the entire history of the city can you decipher them one by one.

The process of continuous expansion of Shanghai’s urban areas is the process of changing the rules of road names. The earliest urban area of ??Shanghai was limited to a part of the southern part of Huangpu District now known as Nanshi (previously this was a separate Nanshi District). There are a number of irregular road names such as "Shangwen Road", "Peng Road", and "Wangyun Road" and many lanes named after local surnames, such as "Wengjia Lane" and "Wujia Lane". Maybe Shanghai was too small back then, with a small population, so the road names were so mixed that people wouldn’t get lost.

As Shanghai changes, roads are being widened, extended and connected, and these road names are gradually disappearing. But this area has been the core of Shanghai for the longest time, for hundreds of years—for young Shanghai, this number is no different from prehistory.

After 1840, a small river "Yangjingbang" in the north of Nanshi began to attract attention. This ordinary small river became the boundary river at the southern edge of the British Concession, and also became the boundary between the two social systems. Boundary river, the boundary river between "East" and "West".

The two sides of the Taiwan Strait have also become a standard place where Chinese and foreigners live together, so a series of words that are neither Chinese nor foreign are named "Pidgin English".

Due to the rapidly expanding population and frequent travel between concessions, the riverside was filled up and roads were built. There was a debate over which road name to choose, and finally it became a Chinese road named after the King of England and spelled in French: Alice Road. After the liberation of Shanghai, it was renamed Yan'an Road, the Road to the Revolutionary Holy Land. After the reform and opening up, viaducts and the Yan'an Road viaduct were built here. From a river to a road, and then to an aerial thoroughfare, this is not only the history of a road, but also the history of urban development that reflects the growth of the city.

"To this day, if only one word is used to summarize Shanghai, 'Yidgbang' may still be the most appropriate title, although this small river has ceased to exist for nearly a century." Studying the history of Shanghai said the old gentleman.

If there were no Huaihai Road in Shanghai, Shanghainese would lose much of their sophistication and bourgeois enthusiasm for life. This street, originally planned by the French, was first called "Baochang Road" in 1901. Baochang Road Ben is a director of the Public Board of the French Concession, a Frenchman who "loves France and China." He served as a public board director in the French Concession for 17 consecutive years, managing the municipal construction of the French Concession. In 1914 it was changed to Xiafei Road. As early as 1885, this young French engineer sergeant took a boat to Shanghai for fun. Except for the French children who were very interested in him, no one paid attention to him. But when the European War broke out and Jiafei made many contributions on the battlefield and was promoted to commander-in-chief of the French Eastern Route Army, the gentlemen of the French Concession Public Affairs Bureau immediately remembered that General Jiafei had been to Shanghai, especially during the Mana War. During the war, Xiafei turned the tide and saved France from danger. The officials of the French Concession Board of Directors were overjoyed and immediately decided to rename Shanghai's most prosperous Baochang Road "Xiafei Road" starting in 1914. "Xiafei Road" was called "Xiafei Road" for 35 years until Shanghai was liberated in 1949. To commemorate the victory of the Huaihai Battle, one of the three famous battles in the Chinese People's Liberation War, the road was changed to Huaihai Road. After all the concessions were taken back, Xiafei Road was renamed Huaihai Middle Road. Huaihai Road is about 6 kilometers long and is now divided into Huaihai East Road, Huaihai Middle Road and Huaihai West Road.

This is a bustling and elegant street, a street comparable to the Champs Elysees in Paris, Fifth Avenue in New York, Ginza in Tokyo, and Orchard Road in Singapore. Especially at night when there are few pedestrians, girls who have read a few French novels will feel very good about themselves and step on their high heels until they kneel loudly.

Jiangwan Wujiaochang, it was once expected to become the political center of Shanghai during the National Government. All east-west roads start with the word "zheng": Zhengtong Road, Zhengli Road, Zhengmin Road Road, etc., and all north-south roads begin with the character "国": Guoding Road, Guohe Road, Guoshun Road, etc. There is also a small road named "Guoxiang Road". This character "庠" is used as the name of a road, which is probably rare in the country.

As a result, after 1949, it became Shanghai's Siberia for a long time, feeling exiled in alienation.

Growing in the Name of Road

With the continuous development of Shanghai, the urban area is expanding at an alarming rate. The demand for road names is more abundant, and the corresponding rules can only be based on a general principle. This principle is to try to name roads after domestic places, and the location of the named area in the country should be roughly equivalent to the location of the road in Shanghai, while not affecting the original main roads. This may be a way to express the harmony of the country and the cosmopolitan community, and it also weakens the local consciousness of Shanghainese. However, when the desire for expression is too strong, the local color that place names should have will be stripped away. East-west roads are named after cities, and north-south roads are named after provinces. This makes Nanjing Road, Yan'an Road, Fujian Road, Shandong Road, etc., not necessarily more individual than Fifth Avenue or 16th Street in New York.

Under this guiding ideology, an interesting phenomenon such as regional road name clustering appeared on the edge of Shanghai's urban area. Place names in the same province were clustered together on the map. "Qinzhou Road" and "Liuzhou Road" appear in the southwest corner (both are place names in Guangxi), "Anshan Road" and "Shuangyang Road" (place names in the northeast) appear in the northeast corner, and "Huma Road" and "Shuangyang Road" appear in the northeast corner. "Hulan Road" (a place name in Heilongjiang).

In fact, this rule has been used in Shanghai for a long time, but as the urban area expands, this rule has been in effect. At the same time, new naming must take into account not to affect the original road names, so some The regions are very close on the map, but very far apart in Shanghai, and there are interesting situations such as multiple Northeastern clusters. The most typical ones are Chifeng Road and Duolun Road in Hongkou District, which were the northeast corner of the original Shanghai city. Now they are basically in a position that should be called "Shanghai Road" or "Lianyungang Road", which is very interesting.

Some people from Anhui used this as a basis to ask the Shanghai Library: Why is there no Anhui Road in Shanghai? Plausibly.

This issue makes the comrades of the Shanghai Library a little embarrassed. My subjective guess is that in places where it is possible to name "Anhui Road", there has never been a road that needs to be named. It is more difficult to find out why there is no "Anhui Road" than to find out why there is a road called "Anhui Road".

In fact, there is always a certain degree of randomness in naming. No road is born with a certain name, and the provincial name used to name the road is not the only one missing. Anhui one.

The area that has benefited most from the development of Pudong is undoubtedly the Lujiazui area (Lujiazui is said to be the birthplace of Lu Xun, the general of Soochow during the Three Kingdoms period). Some Shandong place names that are not well-known and not very economically developed have become more frequent in Shanghai. Extremely advanced vocabulary, such as Boshan, Rushan, etc.

The development after the 1990s suddenly made people discover that road names can be a kind of intangible wealth. The person in charge of the Shanghai Municipal Place Names Office said that there is no Ningxia Road in Shanghai. The Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region took the initiative to apply for the name. Ningxia's Guangxia Group, Ningxia Wolfberry and other famous brand companies and specialty products naturally settled on Ningxia Road, creating a new place in Shanghai. The market flexes its muscles to open up a breakthrough.

At the request of Kaiyuan City in Yunnan, Kaiyuan Road was established. People from the Municipal Place Names Office said that a new set of road naming methods is now being implemented. Some road names have begun to take on the dazzling colors of the times: such as Century Avenue, Wuzhou Avenue, etc.; and a number of memorial roads for scientists such as Li Shizhen Road and Newton Road have appeared in Zhangjiang High-tech Park, which seems to indicate the high-tech content of this area.

The name of the road is silent, but it is almost a display card of the evolution of our political and social life. Any attempt to exhaust the meaning of place names will inevitably become beautiful folly.

Place names identify each station of individual life or urban life. Whether we have stayed or whizzed past, we have entered its coral reef-like tangle.