志    号：2005，9-7

胡同名称：丰富胡同

所在城区：北京市东城区

突出题材：老舍故居小门楼

表现元素：小方门墩

Series Number：2005，9-7

Name of the Hutong：Fengfu Hutong

District：Dongcheng (the east city) District of Beijing

Subject to Highlight：The little arched gateway at Lao She’s old residence

Element to Portrait：Xiaofang mendun (small square stone that support the door)

Chapter 7  Names of Hutongs

Once I said to Zi Hui that the beauty of those ci poems (one genre of Chinese poetry), consists not only in the poems themselves, but also in the names of tunes to which they were composed.  Those names are extremely delicate and clever.  Such names as dujiangyun (which literarily means “clouds floating over the river”), heyebei (which literarily means “a cup made of lotus leaf”), mouyu’er (which literarily means “fishing with hands”), zhenzhulian (which literarily means “screen of pearls”), yan’ermei (which literarily means “charming and seducing eyes”) and haoshijin (which literarily means “good things are nearby”), each name itself is an excellent poem.  I often opened a collection of ci poems, chewed the names of tunes without reading the poems themselves.  The pleasure I got was certainly not less than the pleasure I had from reading a poems or chewing delicious olive.  The names of hutongs in Beijing were just like the names of tunes to which ci poems were composed.  More often than not, merely in two or three characters, there were full of colors and allusions.  The beauty of those names such as longtoujing (which literarily means “the well of dragon head”) or qihelou (which literarily means “a building bridging the river”, is as rich as the beauty of those names of tunes such as yanxingchuan (which literarily means “the boat floating on the river in night”) and lianxiuqin (which literarily means “missing the embroiled quilt”) etc.

Longtoujing and Qihelou are two place names in Beijing.  One is at the west city, the other the east city.  To put names of hutongs and names of tunes side by side for artistic appreciation, and enjoy the charm of classical poetry, it requires the talent of a poet.  The person who wrote the above-quoted passage was indeed a poet.  He is a special figure in the history of Chinese modern literature and his name is Zhu Xiang.  He not only wrote poems, but also produced many essays that portrayed local aroma of Beijing.  The essay quoted above is one of them.  The name of the essay is “Hutong.”

Of course, different people view the names of hutongs from different perspectives.  A poet takes a poetic approach; a scholar takes a scholastic one.  The first book we know of that was entirely devoted to the study of names of hutongs in Beijing is Zhang Jue’s The Book of Streets and Hutongs in the Five Districts of the Capital (《京师五城坊巷胡同集》).  Zhang Jue, whose style name was Tianxi, was born in 1485 (the twenty-first year of Chengha Reign of the Ming Dynasty) and died in 1566 (the forty-fifth year of the Jiajing Reign of the Ming Dynasty).  He was the General Director of the Department of Honored Guards (jingyi wei).  Department of Honored Guards in the Ming Dynasty was the notorious royal secret service.

As the General Director of the Honored Guards, Zhang was in charge of serving and protecting royals, policing and jails.  He also supervised the matters concerning roads, streets, rivers and canals.  Because of his position, Zhang had the opportunity to access the data related to roads, streets, lanes, alleys and hutongs in the city of Beijing.  Plus, he was a person who paid attention to such matters.  As he said himself, “Whenever I saw a record of a street or lane of the five districts in an official book, I always wrote it down; whenever I heard a hutong of Beijing mentioned in people’s talking, I always recorded it too.”

The Book of Streets and Hutongs in the Five Districts of the Capital has recorded more than one thousand names of streets, lanes and hutongs in the inter city, outer city and suburban areas of Beijing.  Among them, there are more than four hundred names associated with the name “hutong”.  However, people would somehow raise their eyebrows to the fact that the first person who studied the names of hutongs was the general director of the notorious royal secret service.

The Couplets of Place Names in Beijing (Beijing Diming Dui, 《京师地名对》), composed by an female Mongolian author, Balike Xingfen, in 1900 (the twenty-sixth year of the Guangxu Reign in the Qing Dynasty), was actually a treatise devoted to the categorized study of names of hutongs in Beijing.  It was said that she wrote the book for purpose of pleasing her parents.  However, the book has turned out to be the pioneer for the categorized study of names of hutongs in Beijing.  This book had more than one thousand place names.  Most of them were names of hutongs.  Following the traditional Chinese way of making couplets, Xingfen categorized the place names in Beijing, including names of hutongs into the following categories: sky and earth, astronomy, seasons, geography, imperial residences, ethics, emotions and sensitivities, human activities, human bodies, relics, ghosts and divinities, immortality and Buddhism, monks and Taoists, Fishes and reptiles, insects, clothes and ornaments, appliances, valuables and jewelries, music, directions and positions, Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches, names of divinatory symbols, colors, function words, double-character words, etc. 

There often are some unexpected effects occurring when isolated hutong names are combined into a couplet.  In Xingfen’s composition, the name “Nei (inside) Gong (palace) Jian (office)” to the name “Wai (outside) Lang (portico) Ying (camp)”, the name “San (three) Bu (not) Lao (getting old, the word made of these three characters means: the ranked official whose title was ‘sanbao’) ” to the name “Wu (five) Ding (to conquer) Hou (official, the word made of these three characters means: the ranked official whose title was ‘having conquered five times’) ”, the name “Anfu (peaceful and fortunate) hutong” to the name “Jixiang (lucky and propitious) hutong”, and the name “Xiguan (theater) hutong” to the name “Goulan (a market show place) hutong”, not only were these pairs artistically composed couplets, they but also revealed some aspects of the hutong culture in Beijing.  The cultural aspect of the couplets probably was not what Xingfen originally expected when she was playing the words games.

The first book on the names of hutongs in Beijing was written by a Japanese, Tata Teiichi (多田貞一).  The title of the book is Records of Place Names in Beijing (Beijing Diming Zhi, 《北京地名志》).  This book was published in September 1944.  It was collected into the “Oriental Cultures Series”, compiled by the New People Publishing House.  Based on the method of categorization, this book studied the place names, mainly names of hutongs, in Beijing.

Many hutongs mentioned by Tata Teiichi in his book had already disappeared when he was doing his study.  He said that there used to be a small hutong shaped as the character “丁” and had been associated to Beiluogu xiang (lane).  It had later been merged with Beiluogu xiang.  The name of the hutong was “Qingfu”. This was a quite interesting name.  Why was this hutong associated with this name?  Tata Teiichi explained:

Qingfu is an insect that was similar to cicada.  It was originated in the south part of China. Larvae of qingfus lived on leaves of grasses.  If a larva was taken, its mother would chase after the larva with no exception.  It was said in Compendium of Materia Medica (Bencao Gangmu, 《本草纲目》) that if you smear the bodies of imagoes to copper coins and bodies of larvae to the string that stringed the coins together, and leave the string of coins somewhere, after you spend coins on the string, those coins would come back to the string by themselves.  Therefore the name qingfu has been used as a nickname of money.

The earliest version of the qingfu story was in the book Guigu Zi (《鬼谷子》, which literarily means “The Mister who lived in the Ghost Valley”) but not Compendium of Materia Medica.  Because of the intimate relationship between the mother and the infant, the name of qingfu eventually turned out to be a nickname of money.  The name was a favorite of merchants and sometimes used as store names.  For instance, the well-known store Rui Fu Xiang has used the word Fu (in the Chinese word Qingfu, the first part “qing” means “green”, referring to the color of the insect, while the second part of the word “fu” is the name of species) as part of its name.  According to Tata Teiichi, at the end of Qingfu hutong there used to be a store that sold crumbed pager.  It was a small store but the owner still hoped for good business.  So he gave the store the name of “qingfu”.  And later the name of the store became the name of the hutong.  It shouldn’t require much effort to understand this.

To categorize names of hutongs while studying them is a method favored by many people.  Books based on this method are also prevailing.  It goes without saying that different books have adopted different criteria. In general, we have the following categories: (1) people, (2) animal, (3) plants, (4) events and objects, (5) nature and weather, (6) geography, (7) architectures, (8) money matters, (9) political matters and (10) famous verbal expressions.

The characteristics of the names of hutongs in Beijing may be summarized as the following:

1. Concise and vivid.  In Beijing, you can hardly find any vague and general hutong names or any hutong names with nitty-gritty details.  Most of hutong names are associated with images and whose meanings are quit easy to figure out.  Many interesting names are simply based on the shapes of hutongs.  For instance, the name of one long hutong is “chang xiang” which literarily means “long alley”; the name of a short hutong could be “gou yiba” which literarily means “dog tail”, or “zhu yiba” which literarily means “pig tail”, since a dog tails and a pig tail are both quite short.  The name of one wide hutong is “Kuan Jie” which literarily means “wide street”; the name of one narrow hutong is “laba” which literarily means trumpet [flower], since the stem of a trumpet flower is quite thin.  The name of one hutong that is narrow and has many turns is “erduo yan” which literarily means “external ear”.  A straight one was named “bi guan” which literarily means the “pen shaft”; a curved one was named “luoquan” which literarily means “[the shape of a] sieve”; a twisted one was named “jiudao wan” which literarily means “a bend with nine turns”.  A square hutong was named “hezi” which literarily means “a box”; a round hutong was named “sihuan” which literarily means “four rings”.  The name of one hutong that has only one end is “men hulu guan” which literarily means “a bottle-gourd jar”.  A bottle-gourd jar is a piggy bank which only has only thin slot at one end.  After you put money into it, the only way to get the money out is to break the jar

2. The aura of royalty.  Beijing is the ancient capital of six dynasties, a city where Sons of Heaven resided.  Therefore, there were many hutongs that were connected to royal families.  Some of such connections are quite explicit, such as “huangcheng gen” which literarily means “at the foot of the imperial city”. Some, however, were not so clear.  For instance, on the south side of west Chang’an Street, there is a small hutong whose name is “tuyang shan” (which literarily means “the hill of drawings”.  This is a strange name.  Was it once a place used to store various drawings?  Of course this was not the reason.  “Tuyang shan” used to be called “tu’er shan” (which literarily means “the hill of rabbits”), which was a garden within the imperial city.   Gao Shiqi, a literati in the Qing Dynasty, called it “tuyuan shan” (which literarily means “hill of rabbit garden”) in one of his essays.  He described the place as that “the hill was made by piled stones, in the middle of the hill, there was a cave.  Two roads headed to the east and the west, circling up, until reached the top.”  On the top of the hill was the “Qingling Palace.”  The hill and the palace were built for the Emperors in the Ming Dynasty to participate in the climbing festivals on the ninth day of the ninth month in each lunar year.  When they stood at the top of the hill, and “looked down at the capital, they could see everything clearly.”  Later, Tu’er Shan was abandoned and demolished.  Residential houses were built on the spot.  However, history won’t back away easily.  It has just adopted another way and is living in the memories of people in Beijing.

3. Layers of historical sediments.  If we trace back to the West Zhou Dynasty, Beijing as a city has had a history of more than three thousand years.  If we trace back to the Yuan Dynasty, the core area of today’s Beijing also has a history of more than seven hundred years.  In the long course of historical development, names of hutongs have inevitably changed.  According to researches, although there are quite a few hutongs that come from the Ming Dynasty, only a few have kept their original names.  There is a small hutong close to Taipinghudongli, which was called “qi jia” (which literarily means “the Qi family”) hutong.  The reason for this name probably was that there was a family with the last name “Qi” living in the hutong.  The name of the hutong was later changed to “qie zi” (which literarily means “eggplant”) hutong in the Qing Dynasty.  According to the analyses of linguists, if one says the word “qi jia” quickly, the pronunciation would sound very close to that of the word “qie zi”.  Therefore, the name of “qie zi (eggplant)” had been used for several hundred years.  1n 1965, the city government of Beijing was planning to put place names in order.  At that time, the Cultural Revolution was already on the horizon.  In that political environment, each name of the street should have a positive political implication.  Probably because the name “eggplant” didn’t have much to dig in terms of political meaning, the name “sunflower (pronounced as ‘kui hua’)” was used instead, since a sunflower was always facing the sun.  So the name of the hutong was changed to Kuiihua hutong.  A small, otherwise quite unheard hutong, whose name has experienced the change from “qi jia” to “kui hua”, has reflected the political turbulences of several generations. 

4. Vulgar as well as elegant.  Hutongs in Beijing have had many vulgar names, such as “gou yi ba (dog tail)”, “zhu yi ba (pig tail)”, “shi ke lang (dung beetle)”, “ba ba (human waste).”  These names have been changed through the way of homophony.  “gou yi ba (dog tail)” now is “gao yi bo (elder man who holds high standard of righteousness)”; “zhu yi ba (pig tail)” now is “zhu wei bo (screen made of pearls and reeds”; “shi ke lang (dung beetle)” now is “shi ke liang (being bright at any second); “ba ba (human waste) now is “ba bao (eight treasures)” which bears an indistinctive allusion to the eight treasures in Buddhist doctrines.  Besides vulgarity we may also find some names that bear local flavors, such as Tu’er (the Chinese word “earth” pronounced in the Beijing dialect) hutong, Ju’er (the Chinese word “chrysanthemum” pronounced in the Beijing dialect) hutong, Xiang’er (the Chinese word “fragrant” pronounced in the Beijing dialect), Puchen Shi (“puchen” is a local way to say “oddments of cloth”, and “shi” means market) hutong, and Malang (a local way to say “dragonfly”) hutong.  To name a small hutong “dragonfly hutong”, what a lovely and delight name!  Unfortunately, both Tu’er hutong and Malang hutong have been demolished and no longer exit.  However, there are some names of hutongs that have been preserved that have nothing to do with vulgarity and have everything to do with elegancy.  For instance, we have such names as “xinghua tian (sky with apricot flowers)”, “baihua shenchu (deep in hundreds of flowers)”, “fangcao di (lawn of fine grass)”, etc.  Those names are quite capable of bringing up an artistic sentiment similar to that brought up by the classical Chinese poems composed at their golden ages of the Tang and Song Dynasties.  These names have provided the evidence that when our ancestors named hutongs they were rather taking some aesthetical viewpoint than picking up whatever came to the mind randomly.   They also display the mentality of Beijing people in regarding to their attitude toward their lives: Why don’t we add some artistic elegancy to our lives that are ordinary, uneventful or even hard?