Shanghai and Shantou: Toponymy of Fishing Gear
Text | Sheng Wenqiang
Source | "Fishing Gear Column"
A place-name is a symbol that notes a geographic entity or geographic space, or "geographical conceptual entity". Place names are often superimposed with wreckage from different fields such as history, folklore, language, geography, etc., which is enough to make toponymics a thick sedimentary rock, and once dissected, you can find the cultural folds in it, which is the charm of place names.
A few years ago, I combed through the names of coastal and riverside areas and found many place names named after fishing gear. This naming method, based on the remnants left by fishery production, is also a folk custom. The entry of fishing gear into place names can be seen as an extension of the function of utensils, and fishing gear overflows its boundaries as tools, thus becoming a very referential place name.
Among the names of coastal cities on the mainland, the most typical fishing gear place names are Shanghai and Shantou.
As we all know, Shanghai is referred to as Shanghai, also known as Shanghai. But what is less well known is that Shanghai is an ancient fishing gear whose prototype dates back even to the Neolithic age. This seems to have nothing to do with the urban landscape of Shanghai today, but if you comb through Shanghai's past life, it is not difficult to understand the origin of the abbreviation "Shanghai".
Our ancestors planted bamboo or piled stones as dams along the coastal rivers, using the tidal difference to intercept fish and shrimp, and those who used bamboo were called Bamboo Hu, and those who used stone were called Shi Hu. Shanghai is one of the oldest fishing gear in history, and the Southern Dynasty Gu Yewang's "Chronicle of Youdi" says: "Insert bamboo in the sea, weave it with rope, and spread two wings to the shore." The tide is gone, the tide is falling. Fish cannot go with the tide, and the name is cloudy." The Taiping Guangji also mentions the "Taiping Guangji": "Recently, there are people at sea who get a thing in the fish, it is a person's hand, and there is a face in the palm of the hand, and the seven tricks are all possessed, and they can move but cannot speak." Pass it on for a long time, or say: 'This god thing should not be killed.' 'He is placed on the water.' This thing floated away, but it took dozens of steps, laughed a few times, and jumped out of the water. In ancient poetry, this instrument is also known as the fish beam, Meng Haoran's "Climbing the Mountain with the Sons" poem cloud "The water falls on the fish beam shallow, the cold dream is deep", that is, the fish beam is exposed after the water falls. Because it was used in rivers, lakes and seas, "扈" was later added three points of water, written "滬", which became "Shanghai" after simplification.
Shanghai was first seen in place names and can be traced back to the Eastern Jin Dynasty. At that time, the Wusong River led directly to the sea, and the coastal residents placed bamboo on the beach, woven with ropes, and the roots were inserted into the mudflats, and the mighty bamboo wall opened its wings to the two banks of the Wusong River to meet the fish, shrimp and crabs that came with the tide. The trumpet-shaped estuary is also called "Du", so the area around the Wusong River is called "Hu Du". Tortoise Meng's "Preface to the Fishing Gear Poem" is more direct: "The bamboo is in the sea (Wu Zhihu du is also). ”
Hudu is also a river full of bamboo, which roughly corresponds to the ancient Wusong River in the area of old Qingpu in the northeast of Qingpu District. Wusong River was called Songjiang In ancient times, also known as Songling River and Kasazawa River, the estuary section was once 20 miles wide, and it was the main waterway of Taihu Lake into the sea. In the fifth year of Tang Tianbao (746), qinglong town was placed on the south bank of the lower reaches of the Wusong River, and the east of the town was bordered by the sea, and the water surface was vast, which was once a world full of fish and Shanghai. In the Eastern Jin Dynasty, Wu's domestic Shi Yutan "repaired the Shanghai Fortress to prevent the sea from being copied, and the people relied on it", and the Shanghai was also a military fortress against the sea Kou, which repeatedly appeared on the map. In the last years of the Eastern Jin Dynasty, Sun En raised an army at sea, and Yuan Song built a fortress of Shanghai to defend Sun En, but it was eventually breached and the city fell to his death. The "New Language and Virtue of the World" records a story related to this battle, from which we can see the suffering of the war in Shanghai during the Six Dynasties:
Wu Junchen Widow, family to filial piety. The mother eats the charred rice at the bottom of the bell, and the left is the county lord's book, and the constant pack is a sac, and every time it is cooked, the burnt rice is stored and recorded, and it is returned to the mother. Later, when Sun En's thief left Wu County, Yuan Fujun marched on the same day. The widow had gathered several buckets of scorched rice, and did not return home, so he took him to join the army. Fighting in Hudu, defeated, the soldiers scattered, fled to the mountains, and starved to death. The widow lived with scorched rice, and people thought that it was a reward for pure filial piety.
■ Tianluodi Net. Ancient nets are very diverse and ingenious, and these inventions from folk wisdom are quite eye-catching. The picture shows the "QiwangTu", which is a small mesh with a truss that requires the joint use of two people, which is found in the "Three Talents Diagram Society" published in the 30th year of the Ming Dynasty (1602)
Sun En was later defeated by Liu Yu at Hudu and fled to the Zhoushan Islands. This Sun En, later known as the "Ancestor of the Sea Kou", was inspired by Sun En, who later used the island as a base. The Eastern Jin dynasty general Liu Yu started his family because of his conquest of Sun En, and gradually became a great power, and finally usurped the Eastern Jin Dynasty and established the Liu Song regime, and the Southern Dynasty began. The regimes of the Southern Dynasty changed frequently, the Regimes of the Song, Qi, Liang, and Chen took turns like a marquee, and most of the state powers were plotted by the warriors to be strong and strong, and the soldiers continued to burn for many years. Then to Hou Jing's chaotic liang, the rich lower reaches of the Yangtze River are "thousands of miles of smoke, rare human movements, and white bones are gathered, such as Qiu Longyan" ("Nanshi Hou Jing Biography"). In the end, Hou Jingzhong rebelled and retreated to Songjiang, where he and dozens of his henchmen took a boat from Shanghai into the sea in an attempt to flee north, and were eventually killed by his subordinates. At that time, the Hudu Arch Weijing Division Jiankang (present-day Nanjing), outside the Zhoushan Islands, could attack Gyeonggi, retreated to the island, as a strategic place, the competition was fierce, changed hands several times, so that life was ruined.
By the middle of the Song Dynasty, Hudu could no longer carry large ships, and merchant ships docked at Shanghaipu, a tributary of the Wusong River, and the old site of Hudu gradually collapsed into the river. During the Jingding and Xianchun periods of the Southern Song Dynasty, Shanghai Pu became increasingly prosperous and was set as a town in Shanghai. Later, the old name of Hu is still in place, and it is used as the abbreviation of Shanghai and is still used today.
■ Cage pot type fishing gear
Similar to Shanghai, the name Shantou is also derived from fishing gear. Shan is an ancient fishing gear, "Shijing · Xiaoya Nan you JiaYu": "There is Jia Fish in the South, and There is Shanshan in the South." "Shan, that is, the net with a lifting line, used to catch small fish and shrimp, is a relatively primitive sac-shaped small net, mainly used for inland fresh water, and the scale of operation is relatively small. There is a study of "Shan zhi shan" in the Song Ben of Yixue Xuan Ying's "Erya YinTu". Shan and Jiao and other cable type mesh is similar, but slightly smaller than The Silk, and the flexibility seems to be better.
In the eighth year of the Qing Kangxi Dynasty (1669), the Pushui Village was changed to Shantou Flood, which was known as Shantou. Today, Shantou has developed into an important port city in southern China. Similar to Shantou, there is also Shanwei, both of which are related to the ancient fishing of Shantou.
Shanghai and Shantou, named after fishing gear, are now covered in high-rise buildings, and ancient fishing gear is hard to find. Fishing gear became the name of the city, an interesting cultural event, a victory for fishing gear, but also a victory for folk customs. Back then, the sea surface of these coastal cities was still full of bamboo and net shadows, and there was no end in sight, and even obscured the beach. Moreover, the use of these fixed fishing gear is not limited to one day, and they occupy the offshore sea with a very high frequency of use. It is conceivable that without the advantage of large and continuous space and the advantage of time for long-lasting use, it is difficult for small fishing gear to become a place name.
Why is the abbreviation of Shanghai "Shanghai" derived from fishing gear, and what are the stories behind it? What is the crab cage that is often accompanied in the mountain fish painting? How do fishermen escape from the hands of murderous pirates with the help of knotting techniques? What kind of strange rituals do new boats need to go through when they enter the water and the boat boss takes the throne?
The "Fishing Gear Column" contains six series of boats, nets, hooks, ropes, cage pots, and rakes, which can be traced back to the secret history of the ocean in the flood era, is the ultimate rhapsody of the marine fishery order, and is the collection and release of the primitive fishing and hunting spirit of ancient Dongyi. Wild history, equations, interviews, quotations, local chronicles, celebrity biographies, family secrets, even illustrations, references, authorship... Between the virtual and the real, a strange time and space with fishing gear as the clue is constructed, which is assembled into a collection of island stories. The net poppy is closely intertwined with strange people and strange things, which is legendary and everyday.