Water Words in the Streets of Shanghai

Over 1000 of the 1500+ characters with the radical have something to do with water. If you're in Shanghai, 沪 (hù) is the water word you'll see most. A 沪 is a weir, a fence-like net, which were erected in the creeks feeding the Yangtze to trap fish going out with the tide. 沪渎 (hùdú) was the ancient name for the mouth of the Suzhou Creek, "the fishing-weir river that empties into the ocean"¹, which was shortened to 沪 as the official abbreviation for the city. Like if we used SF or LA for government documents instead of writing out the whole thing.

(photo of license plate, caption: it's on every car in the city)

I live near 徐家汇 Xujiahui, Shanghai's second downtown. Today it's a major intersection of five streets, but its name translates to "The meeting of rivers on the Xu family estate".² So it'll come as a surprise when you step into an undulating form study of light and concrete.

Worth a night walk for sure. But water's nowhere to be found, even though two of these streets' names stem from it: 漕溪路 （Cǎoxī Road) and 肇嘉浜路 (Zhàojiābāng Road, "auspicious beginnings (bāng)").

What, exactly, is a 浜?

If you're learning Chinese, you've probably found it extremely difficult to remember Chinese names, both places and people³. If you're in alphabet land, somebody gives you their name, you know the spelling, your brain knows how it sounds, and that connection between spelling and sound enables memory. You don't need to know that Louis means king in French and visualize me crowned to remember who I am.

But when you encounter an unfamiliar Chinese character, unless you know the 声旁, the non-radical part, you have no idea what it means OR how it sounds. When a Chinese person introduces themselves, if their name is 成龙 （chéng lóng) or 张三李四 （zhāng sān lǐ sǐ), you bet I'm greeting them with confidence next time I see them. Them's HSK 2 characters. But if they say my name is Liang Weikeng or Su Bingtian or Zheng Qinwen⁴, each of those sounds represents dozens of possible meanings, of which I know a few at best. So to my friends with literary names, sorry for asking you to type them out in Wechat, even if we've already played badminton together a dozen times. I'm doing my best.

Back to 浜. What does it mean?

浜 is a Shanghai-specific character. Native speakers know it when they hear it, in the same way that American English speakers associate words like playa with California, bayous with Louisiana, hollers with Appalachia.⁵

The 浜 character describes a waterway that is, all at once: small but wide enough that boats can move through them, usually manmade, and connected to a larger canal network. Some close equivalents: The Dutch gracht, and the Venetian rio.⁶

Zhaojiabang used to look like this:

In 1954, it was filled in, becoming Zhaojiabang Road.

-visual: This is Zhaojiabang Road today.

caption: Taken in the exact same location, 72 years later

Shanghai used to be entirely made up of waterways like 浜s, hundreds of them. And they retained their original names. Almost every street in downtown Shanghai bears the name of the waterway it was built over. So next time you're walking/biking/Didi'ing around the city, having your ears assaulted by scooter horns, maybe you can imagine being on a boat, bobbing down the still waters of the 浜...

浜 is just one of hundreds of characters used to denote distinguishing features of these waterways. Remembering all those character meanings is hard. So I made this guide - it's an immersive way to make these characters stick by maximizing the number of associations I can make.

And i mean maximizing. The plan is for this to be a perpetually-growing map. I'm going to visit the places where these characters occur and take photos and videos of them. The more rare and harder to find, the better.

Here's the characters I could find by searching online. If you're only looking for characters you would use in daily life, I've added a table for general-use water words (not Shanghai-specific) at the bottom.