Chengdu Means What?! How China Names Its Cities

chongqing Chango Tantin Woohoo Lata So many cities with so many funky names What do they all mean Well today we'll go from the weird to the wholesome and try to figure out why some of these sometimes silly names are what they are Let's get started In America we sometimes name cities after ideas like Philadelphia which is the combination of the Greek words for love and brother Sometimes we name them after geographic features like Salt Lake City Pretty straightforward Sometimes we name them after people like Washington Sometimes we just rebrand or steal names from Europe like New York But what does China do Let's start with some easy ones Much like the rest of the world geographic names are common in China too Remember how I said Woohoo at the beginning That's actually a real city in eastern China called Woohoo in which Wu means overgrown with weeds and Hu means lake Literally Weedy Lake For something less silly Shanghai which is made up of the words Shang on or above and Hai sea or ocean which means its literal name is upon the sea And it is being a massive port in the modern day and possibly mostly submerged a thousand years ago and literally an island upon the sea Down south Hong Kong Cantonese Xiang Gang is made up of the words fragrant and gang harbor So it means fragrant harbor which is thought to come from the incense they used to make there Speaking of Cantonese what is Canton Where did that name come from Well Canton is actually an old Portuguese pronunciation of the province Guandong or Broad East And the capital city of Guangdong is a city called Guangzhou which means broad state Okay Wait A city is called a state Sort of Zhou is commonly translated as state or province nowadays But it can also mean prefecture And a long time ago there was this prefecture called Guangzhou or broad prefecture And it was common practice to name the capital city after the area So yes there were technically two Guangzhou at the same time Guangzhou the state and Guangzhou the city Kind of like New York New York Curveball in this case was that this Guang prefecture was really really big And in the Song Dynasty they were split into two provinces Guangdong broad east and Guangzhou or broad west The city of Guangzhou was in Guangdong and kept its name and status While the city of Nanning literally South Tranquility became the capital of Guangxi Next up the biggest one China's current capital Beijing This name is simply a combination of Bei north and Jing which means a super fancy schmancy imperial capital But that wasn't always the case For most of China's history it was called Beiping in which Ping means peace making its old name northern peace It wasn't until 1420 early on in the Ming dynasty that the capital was moved to Beping and was thus renamed Beijing to reflect its status Now you might be wondering then is there a western capital and an eastern capital No not exactly There's nothing like that in China today The closest thing is the modern city of Xi'an which is a combination of west Xi and An peace Once upon a time it was called the western capital but over the course of history a lot of other cities got that name too As for an eastern capital that actually does exist but in Japan Tokyo actually means east capital When the Meiji Emperor moved the capital from Kyoto to Edo he renamed Edo Tokyo because well it was east of Kyoto Hold on Is there some similarity between Kyoto and Tokyo They sound just like opposites of each other Well the Kyo in Kyoto is the same character as the Kyo in Tokyo but the To in Kyoto is a completely different character which is Du in Chinese And what does Du mean Capital Wait what isn't Jing capital Okay remember how I said is a more fancy schmancy imperial capital So Du means capital but in a more generic sense In modern terms it's like the difference between a capital of a country and a capital of a state or province which means the Kyoto Jingdu in Chinese is literally the super imperial capital I guess they really wanted it to sound especially fancy I gotta say Kyoto actually is a very fancy place I love it there Anyway back to capitals Nowadays the character ting has mostly fallen out of use and you would refer to a nation's capital as Shoudu where Shou means primary or highest So is Du still in use anywhere Actually it is with our next city Chengdu It was and still is the capital of many things including modern-day Sichuan Province but it was never the capital of a far-reaching empire What it lacks in imperial prowess though it makes up for in history Chengdu's name hasn't changed in over 2,500 years with a very interesting origin story Sometime before 1,000 BC an ancestor of China's Zhou Dynasty saw the fertile plains of this area and declared that in the first year it will become a town In the second year it will become a city In the third year it will become a capital And there it is Chengdu or become a capital is exactly what happened Albeit about a thousand years later in around 400 BC Kaiming the 9th Kaiming Jiushi king of the Shu kingdom saw how great the area was moved his capital there and named it according to that ancient declaration And yes this territory of Shu is the same as Liubei's Shu Han during the Three Kingdoms period 600 years later And Chengdu under the exact same name was also the capital Speaking of big cities with cool names the city of Chongqing also has a nice name with a unique story The year 1189 saw the Song dynasty's crown prince first to be promoted to the head of this area then called Yuzhou and later also his ascension to the throne as the new Song Emperor Guangzong Naturally he was very happy about this series of events and called the occasion Shuang Chong Xi Qing literally twice repeated joyous celebration To commemorate this he took two characters out of this statement and renamed the area and city of Yuzhou to Chongqing repeat celebration So in America the free and wild state of Montana is known as big sky country In China Inner Mongolia has a similar topography So you can guess what the capital's name Hohhot means No it has nothing to do with how hot it is there Haha And no it's not actually Big Sky but it is Mongolian for sky blue city because of those same vast blue skies over the open plains Unfortunately it's Chinese name It's just basically a transliteration and is mostly nonsense Finally heading west into the skies the capital of Tibet is called Lhasa in Tibetan but it wasn't always the case Originally this capital was called Rasa or the land of the goats because it was a common goat herding spot In Tibetan means Ra goat and Sa means land Simple cute What changed In around 6:30 AD the first king of the Tibetan Empire moved his capital to Rasa And when he converted to Buddhism and ordered the construction of the Jokang temple to house two statues of the Buddha in the year 641 he decided that land of the goats was no name for a spiritual center and the home of Buddhist relics Rasa was then changed to Lhasa because Lha means god or divine and together with Sa gave the city a new name the land of the gods Unfortunately the Chinese call it La Sa which basically means pull bodhisattva Not sure if that's an honest effort or low-key condescending Anyway having gone from weedy lakes to Himalayan heavens I hope that romp around China and beyond helped explain how some names are deeper than they seem and how some are um not Can you think of any other fun or fun sounding cities we forgot to go over Let me know in the comments below And until next time I hope you can find something to Chongqing about zaijian