Some are ironic. Zhou Zexiong wrote in Memoirs of Shanghai: "My first love started on Huaxi Road, which is a good sign, but it was on Kaixuan Road that I fell into the waterloo of love. Another time, when I thought I had brought love from Wuning Road to Fumin Road, and then strode from Xiangyang Park in the city center to Linjiang Park, on a road called Unity, she and I almost lost our eggs. "
Place names have their symbolic meaning, but this meaning can't be circulated and accepted collectively like RMB, that is, it can't be literal, it belongs to you, and you may not be able to tell others.
Ms. Qiu's family lives in a small villa on the roadside in Sichuan, although she shares it with six families. Graduated from the famous Fuxing Middle School, at the top of Sichuan North Road. Every inch of asphalt cement on this road has witnessed her youth before she was 20 years old. In her words, "I know what every counter in every store in this street sells."
But her territory has changed dramatically. Every time Ms. Qiu goes back to her parents' home to visit Sichuan Road, she will find some changes. When she said this, the corner of her eye moved upward, as if a queen were saying that the careless gardener in the back garden didn't trim it according to her wishes, and the result was "a mess".
She used to be the well-deserved owner of this road, or at least one of the owners. Her husband, Mr. Zhou, is not. He was born in Hailar Road, not far from Sichuan Road. There is another road between the two roads, named siping road. In the densely populated Hongkou District, siping road used to be a dividing line, with shanty towns in Hailaer Road and other places in the east, mainly Su Beiren, and descendants of Cantonese such as Sichuan North Road and Ouyang Road in the west. In the days when Shanghai was relatively closed after 1949, there were two blocks and two classes on both sides of siping road. It took Teacher Zhou a great effort to get through these two blocks.
Mr. Zhou returned to Hailar Road a few years ago and saw that the shanty town he loved and hated was demolished. It has become a new community with an average price of 7,000 yuan per square meter. He said that he felt "suddenly suffocated" and had to park his car and smoke for a long time.
Everyone has a private portfolio about place names, and all kinds of place names have been filed separately by them in their own way.
Enter the historical password of the city.
For a city, place names are like a set of passwords. Only by knowing all the details of the city can we decipher them one by one.
The process of Shanghai's urban expansion is the process of changing road names. The earliest urban area of Shanghai was limited to the south of Huangpu District, also called Heather (formerly a separate Heather District). A number of nonstandard road names, such as Shangwen Road, Lu Peng Road and Wang Yun Road, as well as many alleys named after local surnames, such as Wengjia Lane and Wu Jia Lane, have gathered. Perhaps Shanghai is too small and has a small population, so the mixed names of roads will not make people lost.
With the changes in Shanghai, roads are widening, extending and docking, and these road names are gradually disappearing. But this area has been the core of Shanghai for the longest time, with hundreds of years-for young Shanghai, this figure is no different from prehistory.
After 1840, Pidgin, a small river in the north of Heather, began to attract people's attention. This ordinary river has become the boundary river on the southern edge of the British Concession, and it has also become the boundary river between the "East" and "West" social systems. The two sides of the strait have also become a standard mixed place between China and foreign countries, so a series of neutral words have been named "Pidgin English".
Due to the rapid population expansion and frequent exchanges between concessions, the riverside was paved. After some arguments about the name of the road, it finally became the main road in China 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 Holy Land of Revolution. After the reform and opening up, elevated roads and Yan 'an Road Viaduct were built here. What reflects the growth of a city is not only the history of a road, but also the history of urban development.
"Until today, if only one word is used to summarize Shanghai,' Pidgin' may still be the most appropriate title, even though the river has ceased to exist for nearly a century." The old gentleman who studies Shanghai history said.
Without Huaihai Road in Shanghai, Shanghainese will lose a lot of exquisite and bourgeois enthusiasm for life. Originally planned by the French, this street was called "Changbao Road" in 190 1 year. Chang Bao is a Frenchman who loves France and China. He was a director of the Public Committee of French Concession. He once served as a director of the public board of the 17 French concession, managing the municipal construction of the concession. 19 14 changed to joffre avenue. As early as 1885, this young French engineer sergeant went to Shanghai by boat, and no one paid attention to him except the French children who were interested in him. However, when the European War broke out, Fei Xia made great contributions on the battlefield and was promoted as commander-in-chief of the French Eastern Army, the gentlemen in the French Concession immediately remembered that General Fei Xia had been to the sea, especially in the Battle of Mana, when Fei Xia saved France from danger. The officials of the French Concession Ministry of Industry were ecstatic and immediately decided to rename the most prosperous Changbao Road in Shanghai from 19 14. Joffrey Street was called for 35 years until 1949 when Shanghai was liberated. In order to commemorate the victory of Huaihai Campaign, one of the three major battles of China People's Liberation War, this road was changed to Huaihai Road. All concessions were recovered, and Joffrey Street 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, comparable to the Champs Elysé es in Paris, Fifth Avenue in New York, Ginza in Tokyo and Orchard Road in Singapore. Especially in the night when there are few pedestrians, girls who have read several French novels will feel very good when they step on high heels.
Jiangwan Wujiaochang was expected to be the political center of Shanghai during the National Government. All east-west roads begin with the word "politics": political access, political establishment road, political people road and so on. The north and south roads all start with the word "country": Guoding Road, Guohe Road and Guoshun Road. There is also a path called "Road", and it is rare to use the word "country" as the road name in China.
Results 1949 was Siberia in Shanghai for a long time, and I felt exiled in alienation.
Grow up in the name of the 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 use domestic place names as road names as much as possible, and the location of the naming area in the country should be roughly equivalent to the location of this road in Shanghai, without affecting the original main roads. This may be a way to express the unity of the whole country and the unity of the four seas, and it will also weaken the standard consciousness of Shanghainese. But when this desire for expression is too strong, the regional color of place names will also be stripped. East-west roads are named after cities and north-south roads are named after provinces, so Nanjing Road, Yan 'an Road, Fujian Road and Shandong Road are not necessarily more individual than Fifth Avenue or Sixteenth Avenue in New York.
Under this guiding ideology, there is an interesting situation of regional road name clusters on the edge of Shanghai, and the place names of the same province are concentrated on the map together. Qinzhou Road and Liuzhou Road (both Guangxi place names) appear in the southwest corner, Anshan Road and Shuangyang Road (northeast place names) appear in the northeast corner, and Huma Road and Hulan Road (Heilongjiang place names) appear in the north.
In fact, this rule has been used in Shanghai for a long time, but it has been working with the expansion of the urban area. At the same time, the new naming should take into account that it will not affect the original road names. So some areas are close on the map, but far away in Shanghai, and there are many interesting situations such as northeast clusters. The most typical ones are Chifeng Road and Duolun Road in Hongkou District, which are in the northeast corner of Shanghai. Now they are basically called "Shanghai Road" or "Lianyungang Road", which is very interesting.
Based on this, an Anhui busybody asked the Shanghai Library: Why is there no Anhui Road in Shanghai? Very eloquent.
This problem is very difficult for some comrades in Shanghai Library. My subjective guess is that there has never been a road that needs to be named in a place that may be named "Anhui Road". It is more difficult to know why there is no "Anhui Road" than why there is a road called "Anhui Road".
In fact, names are always random. No road is born with a certain name, and Anhui is not the only province to name roads.
After the development of Pudong, Lujiazui area benefited the most (it is said that Lujiazui was the hometown of Lu Xun, the general of Wu Dong during the Three Kingdoms period). Some Shandong place names, which are not well-known and economically underdeveloped, have become common words in Shanghai, such as Boshan and Rushan.
The development after 1990 suddenly made people discover that road names can be an intangible wealth. The person in charge of the Shanghai Geographical Names Office said that there was no Ningxia Road in Shanghai before, and Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region took the initiative to apply for naming, so famous brand enterprises and special products such as Xia Guang Group and Lycium barbarum in Ningxia naturally entered Ningxia Road, which opened a breakthrough for the Shanghai market.
At the request of kaiyuan city, Yunnan province, there is kaiyuan road again. A person from the Municipal Geographical Names Office said that a brand-new road name naming method is being implemented. Some road names began to wear dazzling colors of the times: such as century avenue and Wuzhou Avenue; Many memorial roads for scientists, such as Li Shizhen Road and Newton Road, have appeared in Zhangjiang Hi-tech Park, which seems to indicate the high-tech content of this area.
The road name is silent, but it is almost a display card in the evolution of our political and social life. And any attempt to exhaust the meaning of place names will inevitably become beautiful stupidity.
Place names mark the stations of personal life or city life. Whether we stayed or whizzed past, we all entered its coral reef entanglement.