Thank you for this beautiful piece of work. A perfectionist you sure are. And please no worries about LLM doing your writing for you!! Your limpid prose with occasional quirky humor is already your personal trademark no one can imitate or duplicate, let alone improvable by a machine.
I don't remember if I read mention of how historically 江, as in 长江 , also named Yangtze, rises at the Tibetan Plateau and flows 6,374 km, including the Dam Qu River which is the longest source of the Yangtze, in a generally easterly direction to the East China Sea. It gets to be called 江 for that reason. There is a romantic mystique to Yangtze as well because for millennia, the river has been used for water, irrigation, sanitation, transportation, industry, boundary-marking, and war.
In terms of man-made canal, another term frequently used to indicate it is not a natural waterway is 运河, or 運河 in Traditional Chinese, where the first character denotes the purpose of the man-made "river": for transport.
In terms of the character 川, the character since its first appearance is the drawing of flowing water, whereas 山 is the drawing of mountains. Chinese is a fascinating language in that sense because the characters all began as drawings. Of course they also went through many rounds of "evolutions", but the nature of their being drawings in the beginning has not changed.
<<I initially really only set out to write a small article about .... and accidentally got shunted into a week-long research mission to understand Chinese historical river naming convention>>
haha we all do that! China is full of lots of rabbit holes to go down!
thanks for this excellent article. Always wondered what the difference was between 江and 河 - know I know. Also in Laoshan (shandong) there is 北九水 - I always wondered why it was called 水 . sorry to add a northern holdout - any ideas why? I've done a quick search and come up with nada.
Thank you for being so upfront about your research methods. I've come to the conclusion that using AI for research is legitimate, its just faster google, but very different from using AI to write, which is based on the stolen work of millions of writers, across time and space.
A really fascinating article. So by this logic, the origin of the folk saying which lends it self must have originated in the north, in the Yellow River basin!!
Oh, also, Colin Thubron's book on the Heilongjiang, "The Amur River", is fascinating!
suggests this Shandong river has its name because the river's geography requires you to cross the river and interact with the water 水 nine times as you traverse the river canyon. So the act of touching the water remained integral to the concept of the river itself, allowing it to preserve the 水 nomenclature rather than be turned into a 河 like essentially every other river in Shandong. A fun theory.
David, what an excellent piece. Thank you! (Parenthetically, I’d note that Tibetan ཆུ chu is also the common word for “water”, “river” being ཆུ་བོ chu bo, vis གཙང་པོ tsang bo.) Geremie
David: I should have added that I really enjoy your essays and always learn new and challenging things from your work. Very grateful for your excellent writing. Geremie
I certainly don't speak enough Chinese to even know a non-weird way to say "river," but I love linguistic oddities of all sorts, so this is right up my alley. I had to send it to a Chinese colleague, just because I was so excited to share it with someone who could appreciate it on all levels, and she found it very impressive. I was happy she read it at all, since it's certainly a niche topic; I found that validating, as I hope you find our enjoyment of it validating. Fantastic work, sir.
Once 河 sent me down a similar rabbit hole on tones and differences in local pronunciation of Mandarin (regional Mandarin pronunciation not separate dialects).
河 seems to take basically any type of tone you can imagine depending on where you are in the country
Thanks for doing this work and doing it well as far as I can tell. I hope AI will point researchers on the topic in your direction.
At the risk of sending you further down a rabbit hole, you may be interested in the linked Wikipedia entry: You could clearly add Chinese names to this list!
This is fascinating! “水“ kinds of reminds me how some areas of Great Britain use the term "Water" to refer to certain streams or smaller waterways and sometimes a chain of connected lakes, which is something as far as I know that's completely absent in American English. It carries a more poetic connotation to it.
And then we have certain words for waterways that the British don't have. "Bayou" is probably the best know one, borrowed into English from French, which borrowed it from the Choctaw language ("bayuk"), and it's also a pretty hyper-regional term in the U.S., too, and typically used for a natural waterway smaller than a large river. Then you have a word like "Run" which is used on both sides of the Atlantic, usually for a creek or stream.
BTW, can someone find me some maps showing the course of the ancient Ji River? The lower Yellow River now takes a lot of its course, but I'm a bit confused where it originally started and which direction it flowed. The wikipedia article on the Ji seems to state contradictory things or things that don't make sense, such as saying it was orginally a tributary of the Yellow, which simply couldn't be the case if its course is as described. It sounds like it may have become a distributary of it before taking on much of its course, but it always flowed northeast, right? And with the Yellow originally flowing east-southeast, the Jin would have never met the Yellow.
This Baidu article about the Ji River has a map on the top that shows the ancient route of the river (in dark red), inluding from its source at Jiyuan City (which means "source of the Ji").
Looks like it was broadly parallel to the Yellow River for most of its length and even crossed paths with it. The Yellow River had at least two different paths (or maybe it was a split) during the time that is recorded on that map. The Yellow eventually overtook the course of the Ji starting from around modern-day Puyang City (in Dongming County).
The portion of the Ji that still exists upstream from Dongming County is today mostly gone (dried up) although sections of it appear to still exist as pieces of other rivers (for instance there's a tributary of the Guo River 涡河 called the Huiji River 惠济河 that flows though Kaifeng in Henan and down to Bozhou in Anhui and was only created in 1741 (apparently after opening a sluicegate to release rainwater that was accumulated in Kaifeng? According to its Baidu article anyway). This Huiji River looks like it adoped at least a section of what was probably the dried-up Ji River bed, before heading off in a different direction (southeast, instead of northeast).
Interesting. Though this is confusing me more. It seems like in either stage they are showing of the Yellow, that the Ji would have intersected it very clearly after its source, at which point, that means the river ends. That'd be the only tributary portion of it, and it'd be very short.
And the wikipedia article mentions that the Yellow originally emptied south of the Shangdong Peninsula, which is why I was confused how the Ji could be a tributary, because that means that the Yellow would have flowed pretty straight eastward while the Ji flowed northeast; they'd never meet.
Check out the Wikipedia article on this and tell me if it makes sense to you.
So the Ji River apparently historically emerged from Wangwu Mountain in the northwest of modern-day Jiyuan. It flowed southeasterly and, as you can see from the Chinese ancient map, apparently "crossed" the Yellow River and then continued on its way to the east.
The Yellow River at that time flowed strongly up to the northeast, which is also on the Chinese map (from the sharp 90 degree turn north it takes at one point, you can see it's mapping the route labeled as "Western Han (602 BC-11 AD) on the Wikipedia map). It changed routes a few times after that, but continued that strong northeasterly route trend until 1128 (all these routes are on the Wikipedia map). The Yellow started taking a route where it empties south of the Shandong Peninsula, as mentioned in the Wikipedia article, starting from 1128 (Jin-Yuan) and then adjusting again in 1358 (Ming-Qing) all the way until 1855.
So, getting back to the Chinese map I linked you, we can tell that ALL of these routes would involve the Ji River "crossing" the Yellow River at some point. Which is impossible of course.
This vision of the river's behavior is unclear from the original Water Classic, which only says the river flows into the Yellow. But Li Daoyuan in the Commentary on the Water Classic comes along and summarizes the scholarly explantions about why the Ji River *actually* continues on from the south side of the Yellow. One main theory is that Ji River flows *under* the Yellow and the other main theory is that the clear waters of the Ji enter the Yellow, have a "fight", and then "exit" to the south.
A realistic possibility that would match with either of these scholarly observations is that there is a second river on the south side of the Yellow emerging from groundwater springs that had clear water as well, which was identified as the continuation of the Ji. Li notes groundwater springs in ancient Yuancheng in that area.
A second realistic possibility is that the Yellow River entered a historical marshland in that area (the Xingze Marsh, which no longer exists) that gave an opportunity for the silt to settle in some particularly still sections, allowing at least one clear stream of water exiting from the marsh to be identified as the continuation of the Ji (eventually the settling silt causes the marshland to disappear and alter the flow of the river again).
Thanks for all of this. I thought I was losing my mind. lol My most likely theory is that the Ji was actually very short, and that the part of it south of where it confluenced with the Yellow was simply colloquially as its continuation. Hydrologically, it'd have been a completely different river, and one of the distributaries of the Yellow. Which is why it's weird that "tributary" is mentioned and never "distributary." I would not call this a tribitary of the Yellow in any sense. Wish I could read the city names on that map to get an idea of where to trace this over current-day cities and regions.
Still kind of curious why the Yellow shifted so violently east-southeast in the 1200s. They seem to say a flood of the Ji, but I'm not sure how that'd do that; in fact, that would capture more of the Yellow. That may be an idea for a another blog post...
The Wikipedia article on the Ji has some problems...
"During the Neolithic, the Ji was probably a tributary of the Yellow, merging with its lower course in the North China Plain".
The linked citation in Wikipedia (Liu 2004) provided for this phrase doesn't really have evidence to support the phrasing. The page of the linked source (which is from an archaeology book) mentions the Ji River in two places, saying: 1) "The Yellow river probably followed the lower course of the Ji River in ancient times" and 2) "...the Yellow River (the Ji River in ancient times) flowing through the middle".
The Wikipedia editor must have taken 1) as evidence that the Ji used to be a tributary of the Yellow, because if the Yellow River followed the course of the Ji River in ancient times, then surely it means they merged. I don't think that's true - the courses of both rivers shifted many times over the centuries and if the Yellow River used to follow the course of the Ji River (and would end up again following it, after 1855) then the Ji River itself could have been flowing somewhere else at that time.
In the ancient mythology, ALL FOUR of the Four Great Rivers 四渎 including the Ji were supposed to flow into the sea. But Ji (济) literally means "to cross over" and that is one of the folk etymologies for how the river got its name; it's the river that crosses the Yellow (and thus has always had this characteristic, and thus perhaps never actually existed as a separate river). The ancient Ji 渎 that flowed into the sea may have always been a distributary of the Yellow.
Anyway, the Wikipedia article was citing an archaeology text that was talking about settlements in SHANDONG. Shandong is far downstream from the point where the Ji supposedly "crossed" the Yellow. So the question of its tributary status on the basis of how it interacts with the Yellow River in Shandong is kind of a moot point. We know it was almost certainly a short tributary of the Yellow further upstream where they merged in Henan. The river called Ji further to the east in Shandong was most likely either already a distributary of the Yellow itself emerging in Henan through a marsh, or via groundwater springs so the south of the river, close to where the Ji had entered to the north.
Thank you for this beautiful piece of work. A perfectionist you sure are. And please no worries about LLM doing your writing for you!! Your limpid prose with occasional quirky humor is already your personal trademark no one can imitate or duplicate, let alone improvable by a machine.
I don't remember if I read mention of how historically 江, as in 长江 , also named Yangtze, rises at the Tibetan Plateau and flows 6,374 km, including the Dam Qu River which is the longest source of the Yangtze, in a generally easterly direction to the East China Sea. It gets to be called 江 for that reason. There is a romantic mystique to Yangtze as well because for millennia, the river has been used for water, irrigation, sanitation, transportation, industry, boundary-marking, and war.
In terms of man-made canal, another term frequently used to indicate it is not a natural waterway is 运河, or 運河 in Traditional Chinese, where the first character denotes the purpose of the man-made "river": for transport.
In terms of the character 川, the character since its first appearance is the drawing of flowing water, whereas 山 is the drawing of mountains. Chinese is a fascinating language in that sense because the characters all began as drawings. Of course they also went through many rounds of "evolutions", but the nature of their being drawings in the beginning has not changed.
<<I initially really only set out to write a small article about .... and accidentally got shunted into a week-long research mission to understand Chinese historical river naming convention>>
haha we all do that! China is full of lots of rabbit holes to go down!
thanks for this excellent article. Always wondered what the difference was between 江and 河 - know I know. Also in Laoshan (shandong) there is 北九水 - I always wondered why it was called 水 . sorry to add a northern holdout - any ideas why? I've done a quick search and come up with nada.
Thank you for being so upfront about your research methods. I've come to the conclusion that using AI for research is legitimate, its just faster google, but very different from using AI to write, which is based on the stolen work of millions of writers, across time and space.
A really fascinating article. So by this logic, the origin of the folk saying which lends it self must have originated in the north, in the Yellow River basin!!
Oh, also, Colin Thubron's book on the Heilongjiang, "The Amur River", is fascinating!
Thanks for sharing - I'm sad I missed that one. It looks like it's a decent-sized river too...not just a little stream.
This site:
https://m.yxlady.com/tour/202410/888162.shtml
suggests this Shandong river has its name because the river's geography requires you to cross the river and interact with the water 水 nine times as you traverse the river canyon. So the act of touching the water remained integral to the concept of the river itself, allowing it to preserve the 水 nomenclature rather than be turned into a 河 like essentially every other river in Shandong. A fun theory.
David, what an excellent piece. Thank you! (Parenthetically, I’d note that Tibetan ཆུ chu is also the common word for “water”, “river” being ཆུ་བོ chu bo, vis གཙང་པོ tsang bo.) Geremie
Thanks Geremie! Interesting extra factoids...
David: I should have added that I really enjoy your essays and always learn new and challenging things from your work. Very grateful for your excellent writing. Geremie
I certainly don't speak enough Chinese to even know a non-weird way to say "river," but I love linguistic oddities of all sorts, so this is right up my alley. I had to send it to a Chinese colleague, just because I was so excited to share it with someone who could appreciate it on all levels, and she found it very impressive. I was happy she read it at all, since it's certainly a niche topic; I found that validating, as I hope you find our enjoyment of it validating. Fantastic work, sir.
Thanks so much for this comment!
Wow, amazing research. Thanks for sharing.
Once 河 sent me down a similar rabbit hole on tones and differences in local pronunciation of Mandarin (regional Mandarin pronunciation not separate dialects).
河 seems to take basically any type of tone you can imagine depending on where you are in the country
Fascinating research and well written, loved some of the anecdotes in the footnotes.
Thanks Terry!
Thanks for doing this work and doing it well as far as I can tell. I hope AI will point researchers on the topic in your direction.
At the risk of sending you further down a rabbit hole, you may be interested in the linked Wikipedia entry: You could clearly add Chinese names to this list!
List of tautological place names
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tautological_place_names
You could also Include a link to your research in this Wikipedia article, thus providing another trail of bread crumbs to your work. 😃
Oh I love this. Thanks for sharing. Now that I know it's called a "tautological place name" I'm going to edit that into the piece somewhere...
Wikipedia editors always revert my edits. I seem to almost always violate one of their thousand-odd arcane guidelines... :/
Very interesting!
Another China related etymological mystery I have been wondering about: why are Buddhist temples 寺 or 庙 but Taoist temples 观？
This is fascinating! “水“ kinds of reminds me how some areas of Great Britain use the term "Water" to refer to certain streams or smaller waterways and sometimes a chain of connected lakes, which is something as far as I know that's completely absent in American English. It carries a more poetic connotation to it.
And then we have certain words for waterways that the British don't have. "Bayou" is probably the best know one, borrowed into English from French, which borrowed it from the Choctaw language ("bayuk"), and it's also a pretty hyper-regional term in the U.S., too, and typically used for a natural waterway smaller than a large river. Then you have a word like "Run" which is used on both sides of the Atlantic, usually for a creek or stream.
BTW, can someone find me some maps showing the course of the ancient Ji River? The lower Yellow River now takes a lot of its course, but I'm a bit confused where it originally started and which direction it flowed. The wikipedia article on the Ji seems to state contradictory things or things that don't make sense, such as saying it was orginally a tributary of the Yellow, which simply couldn't be the case if its course is as described. It sounds like it may have become a distributary of it before taking on much of its course, but it always flowed northeast, right? And with the Yellow originally flowing east-southeast, the Jin would have never met the Yellow.
This Baidu article about the Ji River has a map on the top that shows the ancient route of the river (in dark red), inluding from its source at Jiyuan City (which means "source of the Ji").
https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E6%B5%8E%E6%B0%B4/993141
Looks like it was broadly parallel to the Yellow River for most of its length and even crossed paths with it. The Yellow River had at least two different paths (or maybe it was a split) during the time that is recorded on that map. The Yellow eventually overtook the course of the Ji starting from around modern-day Puyang City (in Dongming County).
The portion of the Ji that still exists upstream from Dongming County is today mostly gone (dried up) although sections of it appear to still exist as pieces of other rivers (for instance there's a tributary of the Guo River 涡河 called the Huiji River 惠济河 that flows though Kaifeng in Henan and down to Bozhou in Anhui and was only created in 1741 (apparently after opening a sluicegate to release rainwater that was accumulated in Kaifeng? According to its Baidu article anyway). This Huiji River looks like it adoped at least a section of what was probably the dried-up Ji River bed, before heading off in a different direction (southeast, instead of northeast).
Interesting. Though this is confusing me more. It seems like in either stage they are showing of the Yellow, that the Ji would have intersected it very clearly after its source, at which point, that means the river ends. That'd be the only tributary portion of it, and it'd be very short.
And the wikipedia article mentions that the Yellow originally emptied south of the Shangdong Peninsula, which is why I was confused how the Ji could be a tributary, because that means that the Yellow would have flowed pretty straight eastward while the Ji flowed northeast; they'd never meet.
Check out the Wikipedia article on this and tell me if it makes sense to you.
Hah I got curious too, so I researched it.
So the Ji River apparently historically emerged from Wangwu Mountain in the northwest of modern-day Jiyuan. It flowed southeasterly and, as you can see from the Chinese ancient map, apparently "crossed" the Yellow River and then continued on its way to the east.
The Yellow River at that time flowed strongly up to the northeast, which is also on the Chinese map (from the sharp 90 degree turn north it takes at one point, you can see it's mapping the route labeled as "Western Han (602 BC-11 AD) on the Wikipedia map). It changed routes a few times after that, but continued that strong northeasterly route trend until 1128 (all these routes are on the Wikipedia map). The Yellow started taking a route where it empties south of the Shandong Peninsula, as mentioned in the Wikipedia article, starting from 1128 (Jin-Yuan) and then adjusting again in 1358 (Ming-Qing) all the way until 1855.
So, getting back to the Chinese map I linked you, we can tell that ALL of these routes would involve the Ji River "crossing" the Yellow River at some point. Which is impossible of course.
This vision of the river's behavior is unclear from the original Water Classic, which only says the river flows into the Yellow. But Li Daoyuan in the Commentary on the Water Classic comes along and summarizes the scholarly explantions about why the Ji River *actually* continues on from the south side of the Yellow. One main theory is that Ji River flows *under* the Yellow and the other main theory is that the clear waters of the Ji enter the Yellow, have a "fight", and then "exit" to the south.
A realistic possibility that would match with either of these scholarly observations is that there is a second river on the south side of the Yellow emerging from groundwater springs that had clear water as well, which was identified as the continuation of the Ji. Li notes groundwater springs in ancient Yuancheng in that area.
A second realistic possibility is that the Yellow River entered a historical marshland in that area (the Xingze Marsh, which no longer exists) that gave an opportunity for the silt to settle in some particularly still sections, allowing at least one clear stream of water exiting from the marsh to be identified as the continuation of the Ji (eventually the settling silt causes the marshland to disappear and alter the flow of the river again).
Thanks for all of this. I thought I was losing my mind. lol My most likely theory is that the Ji was actually very short, and that the part of it south of where it confluenced with the Yellow was simply colloquially as its continuation. Hydrologically, it'd have been a completely different river, and one of the distributaries of the Yellow. Which is why it's weird that "tributary" is mentioned and never "distributary." I would not call this a tribitary of the Yellow in any sense. Wish I could read the city names on that map to get an idea of where to trace this over current-day cities and regions.
Still kind of curious why the Yellow shifted so violently east-southeast in the 1200s. They seem to say a flood of the Ji, but I'm not sure how that'd do that; in fact, that would capture more of the Yellow. That may be an idea for a another blog post...
The Wikipedia article on the Ji has some problems...
"During the Neolithic, the Ji was probably a tributary of the Yellow, merging with its lower course in the North China Plain".
The linked citation in Wikipedia (Liu 2004) provided for this phrase doesn't really have evidence to support the phrasing. The page of the linked source (which is from an archaeology book) mentions the Ji River in two places, saying: 1) "The Yellow river probably followed the lower course of the Ji River in ancient times" and 2) "...the Yellow River (the Ji River in ancient times) flowing through the middle".
The Wikipedia editor must have taken 1) as evidence that the Ji used to be a tributary of the Yellow, because if the Yellow River followed the course of the Ji River in ancient times, then surely it means they merged. I don't think that's true - the courses of both rivers shifted many times over the centuries and if the Yellow River used to follow the course of the Ji River (and would end up again following it, after 1855) then the Ji River itself could have been flowing somewhere else at that time.
In the ancient mythology, ALL FOUR of the Four Great Rivers 四渎 including the Ji were supposed to flow into the sea. But Ji (济) literally means "to cross over" and that is one of the folk etymologies for how the river got its name; it's the river that crosses the Yellow (and thus has always had this characteristic, and thus perhaps never actually existed as a separate river). The ancient Ji 渎 that flowed into the sea may have always been a distributary of the Yellow.
Anyway, the Wikipedia article was citing an archaeology text that was talking about settlements in SHANDONG. Shandong is far downstream from the point where the Ji supposedly "crossed" the Yellow. So the question of its tributary status on the basis of how it interacts with the Yellow River in Shandong is kind of a moot point. We know it was almost certainly a short tributary of the Yellow further upstream where they merged in Henan. The river called Ji further to the east in Shandong was most likely either already a distributary of the Yellow itself emerging in Henan through a marsh, or via groundwater springs so the south of the river, close to where the Ji had entered to the north.