-------- Original Message --------
Subject:        Chinese urban names in authority file
Date:   Wed, 22 Aug 2007 16:44:08 -0500 (CDT)
From:   Christopher Winters <[log in to unmask]>
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I'd be very grateful to find out exactly what
the rational is for the way Chinese city names
appear in the authority file.

Sometimes there's a distinction between cities
(populated places) and administrative units (shi)
and sometimes not. That is, there's both Hangzhou
(China) and Hangzhou Shi (China). Wuhan and
Guangzhou work the same way, and there's also a
variant distinction between Chengdu (China) and
Chengdu Shi (China : Municipality).

But Chongqing, perhaps the world's most spectacularly
overbounded city, is (if I've understood right) always
Chongqing (China), no matter what the focus of the work.
The other province-equivalent cities Beijing, Shanghai,
and Tianjin work the same way.

However, numerous cities (Fuzhou Shi, Shenzhen Shi)
seem always to have the "Shi." These tend to be smaller,
but some people say Shenzhen has 10 million people.

Is this a question (as I suspect) partly of size
and partly of cataloging tradition? But do many
catalogers really try to make a distinction, say,
between Hangzhou (China) and Hangzhou Shi (China),
and, if so, what exactly is the distinction in an
era when cities do not end at walls or at political
boundaries?

I'd be very grateful for any enlightenment here.

Chris Winters
University of Chicago Library