Talk:Tingzhou Prefecture

Rename

The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: merge or expand instead of move. —Darkwind (talk) 06:35, 3 January 2013 (UTC)

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Tingzhou fu → Tingzhou (prefecture) – "Fu" (府) is a semantic element and should not be transliterated. It is not part of the name itself, and would simply be translated as Tingzhou or "the Prefecture of Tingzhou." d.s.ronis 13:00, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

If "Tingzhou fu" is to be renamed, "Tingzhou Prefecture" probably should be the new title. However, I think the article should be merged with the article "Changting Prefecture", which talks about the same jurisdiction. -- Vmenkov (talk) 04:01, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

I support merging the two articles, and now that I have looked beyond simply the awkward page title (my fault, I apologize), I believe the information from these two articles should be merged with Changting County article. It seems like there is a lot of unnecessary duplication and not much notability in these two other pages. -Devin Ronis (d.s.ronis) (talk) 13:07, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

While the two articles about the historical prefectures should be merged, I don't think we should merge the article about the historical prefecture with that about the modern county. The old-style fu were second-level units and included multiple counties (xian) each, so the fu were more like today's prefecture-level cities. So I think it would make more sense to keep the fu and xian articles distinct. -- Vmenkov (talk) 16:58, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

I initially felt that way as well, but it seems that most historical prefectures are dealt with on wikipedia under their modern equivalents (and the Changting County article already has a section for its historically larger status as a fu) except for ones which are drastically different, the provincial examples of Zhili or Andong come to mind. I should admit my ignorance on the topic. This is only my impression. I found nothing policy-wise on how this should be dealt with. I have no firm opinion either way. I am simply leaning towards merger of the three due to the paucity of information currently available in the two articles, should someone demonstrate greater notability or expand the article I would have no objection to leaving a merger of the first two separate, but as things stand they don't seem to merit a separate article. Despite this, I am still mostly permissive in my attitudes regarding wikipedia policies and realize the newly merged article may be expanded later. Should no one else voice an objection, I will support user Vmenkov on this. -Devin Ronis (d.s.ronis) (talk) 11:33, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

Devin, I understand your argument in favor of not introducing unnecessary new entities. However, I feel that Ming/Qing prefectures (fu) are very different creatures from modern counties, even fart as their geographical scope is concerned. Fu were higher-order entities than counties (xian), and each fu included several counties. As you can see from du Halde, Fujian (Fo kien, in the French Jesuits' transcription) was divided into just 9 prefectures (fu) ca. 1700:

1. Fuzhou
2. Quanzhou
3. Jianning
4. Yanping
5. Tingzhou (the only one for which we have a separate article now)
6. Xinghua (zh:兴化府)
7. Shaowu
8. Zhangzhou
9. Taiwan (yes, Taiwan was a prefecture of Fujian in those days)

Each fu would include on average 7-8 counties.

On the pragmatic level, I think that having prefecture articles (rather than redirects to modern county or prefecture-level city articles) is useful because they are often enough mentioned in historical works (after all, they were around for 500+ years), and thus can and will be linked to from other articles that use those works as their sources. For the same reason, finding "reliable sources" on each fu should not be a problem.

The fact that we have few articles on fu (even if we have two on this particular one :-) does not mean, in my view, that we should merge away those that do exist. Just the contrary - we should create more (in fact, I just created one last week). In fact, in the Chinese Wikipedia they seem to have articles on most of them already, as this template, zh:Template:明朝行政区划, indicates. Generally, the tendency in en.wiki is toward the creation of more articles for historical administrative units, such as e.g. the governorates of the Russian Empire. So I think that a more prudent course of actions would be to actually create a copy of the Chinese template zh:Template:明朝行政区划 (Ming-Qing administrative territorial structure) and the appropriate category hierarchy, and let those interested in such matters gradually fill it in with articles. -- Vmenkov (talk) 18:02, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

Support for Menkov's proposal. Your argument is very well founded, and you have the information I did not have when forming my opinion (and kudos on your link, I never find anything that cool at archive.org). My argument though was not that counties and fus should be treated the same. This county just underwent an administrative change, where it was effectively demoted from being the modern equivalent of a provincial level city to just a county seat. Given the dramatic historical distinction, I believe inclusion of the page is fully warranted, but for fu which are the same as modern prefectures, it seems less necessary to have distinct pages. I'll still support anyone willing to put the work in.

I still don't see how fu prefectures are much more distinct from modern diqu prefectures, it's just that some (well at least this one) previously important fu are now less significant counties or were merged, and for these fu separate articles are fully warranted. It seems that Longyan is now the prefecture level city of what presumably was more or less the same territory previously known as Tingzhou at least until 1734 when Longyan prefecture was created, presumably dividing the earlier fu in two? Issues like these should be fully covered and clearly explained in these articles on historical divisions, which I agree there are far two few of at present. -Devin Ronis (d.s.ronis) (talk) 11:19, 24 December 2012 (UTC)

I agree that in many cases the old fu roughly correspond to today's prefecture-level cities; in such cases we probably could have a redirect, say from a particular fu article to something like Quanzhou#History, etc, until a proper historical article is created. -- Vmenkov (talk) 16:55, 24 December 2012 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.