When it comes to Wangzhi Road, people will think of the Chinese Communist Party setting sail here; stepping on Nanjing Road Pedestrian Street, people will see the bustling scene of China's first commercial street... In Huangpu District, the naming of streets and alleys seems disorderly, but it pins on the daily life of the residents here, integrating individual and collective life memories, and people's nostalgia is intertwined with the changes of the city.
In recent years, urban renewal and the transformation of old areas have accelerated gear shifts, and some old place names and road names have also been obliterated in history in the space change. How to make the old place names with profound historical and cultural heritage shine again?
"The best protection is to use." At the launching ceremony of the Huangpu District Old Geographical Names Investigation and Protection Project held today (19th), Shi Chaoyi, associate professor of the Department of Administration of East China University of Science and Technology and director of the Shanghai Geographical Names Society, said.
In Shanghai, there are many experts and scholars specializing in the study of place names and road names. "What can be called 'old', and to what extent should the protection of old place names and road names be achieved?" This was her doubt when she first started doing research. After reading the historical materials, she found that the historical span of Shanghai Chenglu is large, and there are very few place name road names with a history of more than a thousand years, "so the historical value of Shanghai place name road names cannot be defined by pure duration."
Shi Chaoyi believes that huangpu district, as a historical and cultural area and urban core area of an international metropolis, has great protection value for its old place names. Take Yuyuan Street as an example, which has preserved the customs and customs of the Ming Dynasty, the old school yard road is a former military training ground, and the Songxue Street is named after the calligrapher Songxue Dao man Zhao Mengfu. "If we can collect the place names and road names recorded in the local history of each period and display them in a visual timeline with digital technology, I believe it will become a cultural communication carrier that people like to hear."
"History is not just the story of the past, history is also our present." Ma Jun, director of the Institute of History of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences and the Research Office of Modern History, usually likes to walk the streets and alleys in order to find an "iron gate". Ma Jun said that since 1925, the concession authorities have successively erected iron gates at the junction with China to block the influx of refugees, and the iron gates left behind are not only historical witnesses, but also help historians to determine the specific geographical location of the former place names and road names. Because of this period of concession history, some roads in Shanghai not only have Chinese names, but also foreign names, and the excavation of old place names and old road names has become a comparative study. "Older people know that there is a mill street in Shanghai, because there was indeed a mill there; the French name of the road is RUE DU MOULIN, and the French at that time named the road after the mill, perhaps reminiscent of the famous dance hall 'Moulin Rouge' in Paris."
Old place names and old road names are an important carrier for people to understand the Culture of Shanghai School, and it is precisely the purpose of the research and protection of the historical place name culture in Huangpu District to retain the "old" things in Huangpu and retain the "lanes" of the old city. According to reports, the project will be the first to open in Yuyuan Street. In the future, the project team will focus on building a community governance community as the center, in the process of carrying out the protection of geographical names and cultural heritage, widely mobilize the participation of community residents, awaken common urban memory through the old geographical names culture, and build an emotional community with strong identification and community awareness; use the latest information technology means to establish and improve the geographical names list system and geographical name information database to provide basic information support for the inheritance of geographical names culture; build a cooperation platform to promote data sharing with relevant departments and social subjects. Jointly develop the geographical name cultural industry, enrich the geographical name cultural products and services; innovate the way of dissemination of geographical name culture, research and develop television programs or network programs that integrate interest, knowledge and ideology, widely disseminate geographical name culture to the society, and tell the story of Shanghai well; rely on the community cloud to develop more application scenarios with wide popularity, fast dissemination speed and strong visualization, such as micro-classrooms, to popularize geographical name cultural knowledge to community residents, especially to cultivate the "local feelings" and "regional identity" of the younger generation, and build the feelings of home and country.
Author: Zhou Chen
Editor: Wang Wanyi