Among the 13 abbreviations for cities in Jiangsu Province, Nanjing stands out. Neither of the characters, “Nan” (南; south) or “Jing” (京; capital), are employed to abbreviate our City’s name. So why did we go with “Ning” (宁)? Could it also not be abbreviated as “Nan” or “Jing”?
The “Ning” in question comes from our City’s District of Jiangning (江宁), since it is also a former name of Nanjing.
So while that explains that, in theory, Nanjing could be abbreviated as “Nan”. Generally speaking, the abbreviation of a Chinese city is usually the first character of its name. Looking at our Province as an example, the cities of Suzhou, Changzhou, Zhenjiang, Yangzhou, Taizhou, Yancheng, Lianyungang, Huai’an, Suqian and Xuzhou all follow this standard.
Nanjing, Wuxi and Nantong are the exceptions to the rule. The case of Nanjing and Nantong is the same; the four directional terms; north, south, east and west; are not suitable as city abbreviations. Therefore, the abbreviations for cities such as Beijing, Nanning, Nanchang, Xi’an and Dongguan do not employ their initial characters.
However, we often see that Nanjing Library is abbreviated as “Nan Tu”, Nanjing Museum is abbreviated as “Nan Bo”, Nanjing University is called “Nan Da” and Nanjing University of Astronautics & Aeronautics is “Nan Hang”.
Retaining the “Nan” follows the general rules for abbreviating the names of institutions in China; use the first and third characters of the full name.
So what’s a city to do when the first character of its name is not suitable as an abbreviation? Easy; use the second one. Both Wuxi and Nantong adopt such a simple solution. But for Nanjing, this still doesn’t work. With it meaning, “capital”, “Jing” can only be used for Beijing.
In the past of course, Nanjing was the capital of China, and at that time, it was indeed abbreviated as “Jing”, in something of a collision between history and linguistics.
To use a working example, when we refer to the “Beijing-Shanghai Railway” (京沪铁路), we need to be sure we are not talking about pre 1949. Were we, the same four characters would be the “Nanjing-Shanghai Railway”.
Just to really muddy the waters, there is however, one special instance when Nanjing is indeed abbreviated as “Nan”.
That would be when we refer to it as part of a group of cities. Hence, the top-tier cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen are abbreviated by using the first character of each city’s name (北上广深).
Were we to continue, the next tier down would be Wuhan, Hangzhou and Nanjing (武杭南), about the only time we see “Nan” employed as the abbreviation for Nanjing. And even that’s pretty rare.
