Reflections | Where the short names of Chinese provinces, regions and cities came from
- Much like US states are abbreviated to two letters, so too are China’s administrative divisions represented by a shortened, single character
- Often, that comes from the longer name of the area, but some reference the region’s distant past or geography
On a highway in Shenzhen recently, I spied a mud-splattered car that had perhaps travelled more than 3,000km from Jilin province. In any case, I could tell from its licence plate that the vehicle was registered in China’s northeast.
China is divided into 33 “first-level administrative divisions”, consisting of 22 provinces; four municipalities (Beijing, Chongqing, Shanghai and Tianjin); five autonomous regions (Guangxi, Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, Tibet and Xinjiang) and two special administrative regions (Hong Kong and Macau). In addition to these is Taiwan, governed by the nominal Republic of China, which Beijing considers a renegade territory that has yet to be reunified with the Chinese nation.
In the same way that American states are abbreviated to two letters in postcodes (TX for Texas, for example), each of China’s administrative divisions has a single-character name that is a short form of its longer name. It is this character that indicates on the licence plates of civilian vehicles the place of their registration.
There are several ways of truncating the names of Chinese administrative divisions, the most obvious of which is using a character that forms part of the longer name. The short names of Beijing and Tianjin are Jing (京) and Jin (津), respectively, and the character on the licence plate of that car I saw in Shenzhen was Ji (吉), short for Jilin. The short forms for Hong Kong and Macau are Gang (港), the “Kong” in Hong Kong, and Ao (澳), the first character of Macau’s Chinese name Aomen (“Ou-mun” in Cantonese).
Another way of shortening a name is referencing an important or famous geographical feature in the province. Guangxi is abbreviated to Gui (桂) for Guilin, the area celebrated for its otherworldly beauty. The short names for Jiangxi and Hunan are Gan (贛) and Xiang (湘), so named because of the economically important Gan and Xiang Rivers in the landlocked provinces.
