The origin of Shanghai’s road names
The street names in Shanghai are named for the following reasons:
1. Influence from the concession.
In the early days of the British Concession, road names were randomly chosen. In 1862, the British and American Concessions were merged into the Public Concessions, and each had their own opinions on the road names within the concessions. In the end, the two sides compromised and decided to name the north-south and east-west roads respectively after Chinese provinces and cities. On May 5, 1862, British Consul Maihua Tuo issued the "Shanghai Road Naming Memorandum", formulating the principle that all north-south streets should be named after the names of provinces, and east-west streets should be named after the names of cities. The first batch of 19 roads were named. In order to commemorate the huge benefits brought to them by the Treaty of Nanjing, the concession officials named Park Lane Nanjing Road, and the original Consulate Road was named after the name of the Chinese capital: Beijing. road.
But Shanghainese once rejected these road names set by foreigners and called Nanjing Road Dama Road, while Jiujiang Road, Hankou Road, Fuzhou Road, and Guangdong Road were called Second, Third, and Four or five-horse road, and later the shorter Beihai Road was called six-horse road. It was not until 1949 that the above-mentioned road names designated by foreigners were uniformly accepted.
There is one exception. Guangdong Road runs east-west, but it has the name of a province. Because the original name was in English, the road was changed to "Cantan Road". In the early days of Sino-foreign exchanges, this word could be understood as either "Guangdong Road" or "Guangzhou Road". When it was first named, the original meaning was "Guangzhou Road", but the Chinese translated it as "Guangdong Road".
2. The product of the Revolution of 1911.
Shanghai was an important area during the Revolution of 1911, and its municipal construction was also deeply affected by it. When roads were built in 1912, they were named Hanzhong Road, Manzhou Road (today's Jinyuan Road), Mongolia Road, Xinjiang Road and Tibet Road. It is taken from the fact that the Chinese nation is a harmonious country of the five major ethnic groups of Han, Manchu, Mongolia, Hui and Tibet. The original "President Road" was changed to "***he Road", the section of Nanchuan Hong Road along the Suzhou River was changed to "Guangfu Road", the eastern section was changed to "Guoqing Road", and Xinzha Bridge was changed to "Datong Road".
3. The product of the period when national capital flourished.
In the early days of the Republic of China, Shanghai's national capital developed rapidly, and more of it was concentrated in the Zhabei area. In order to express the desire to revitalize China and prosper the nation, the newly opened roads were named Central Road and Yongxing Road. , Zhonghua New Road, Hongxing Road, Huasheng Road, Huachang Road, Minli Road, Minde Road, etc.
4. The product of the “Greater Shanghai Plan”.
Nowadays, the roads in Wujiaochang and Jiangwan areas of Shanghai are mostly preceded by the words "people" and "guo". Because there was a "Greater Shanghai Plan" during the Republic of China, the road construction plan was to take Wujiaochang as the center and build five main roads radially around, with branch roads connecting each main road. Among them, all roads parallel to Songhu Road and Huangxing Road use the characters "min" and "guo" as the first characters in their road names, such as: Minqing Road, Minyue Road, Minyi Road, Minzhuang Road, Minfu Road, Guohe Road, Guojing Road, Guoji Road, etc.; for those parallel to Xiangyin Road, use "Zheng" and "Fu" as the first character of the road name, such as: Zhengji Road, Zhengfa Road, Zhengben Road, Zhengxi Lu et al. Later, due to the Japanese invasion of Shanghai, the "Great Shanghai Plan" was stopped, and not a single road with the prefix "Fu" was completed.
5. Minor adjustments and changes by the Kuomintang city government.
After the victory of the Anti-Japanese War, the Kuomintang government used names such as "Fuxing", "Jianguo" and "Zhongzheng" in road names: In order to commemorate the heroes of the Republic of China, "Linsen", "Qimei", " Some roads were named after people such as Yingshi.
6. Changes after the founding of New China, especially since the reform and opening up.
In the early days of the founding of New China, in 1950, the government only changed the names of a few roads, and still used the convention of naming places.
In 1979, Shanghai established place name management agencies at the municipal and district and county levels, conducted a census and naming of place names, and made major changes. Mainly due to the development of municipal construction, some original roads have been canceled and some new roads have been added. At the same time, due to the construction of Pudong New Area and other development zones, hundreds of new residential areas have been added, and the number of roads has increased rapidly.
The roads have New Age names.
A comprehensive review of the history of place naming in Shanghai reveals four lessons: 1. Respect the history of the city’s formation and development, and make place names a distinct commemoration of each period; 2. Respect the participation of “foreigners” and do not completely deny foreigners. The remaining place names; 3. Mainly use conventional place names, and do not exclude the appropriate use of some personal names as place names; 4. During the reform period, there must be new place names that reflect the spirit of reform.
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).