The Legend Behind the Name Hefeng

The record

The Hefeng Town profile page states: "It is said that a beautiful phoenix, admiring the scenery of Shijiu Lake, came to rest on Qishan, and from this the name Hefeng derives."

On its nature

The word "legend" is the page's own, indicating that the page does not treat the account as the conclusion of documentary scholarship. This entry records only the existence of the story and its source, and does not use it to infer the date the town was established or how the settlement took shape.

Other uses of the character "phoenix" in the local gazetteers

The same area has several place names containing the character for phoenix in the old gazetteers, which shows that the association is not wholly foreign to the locality, though these uses are insufficient to establish the legend of the name Hefeng.

Volume 6 of the Guangxu Gazetteer of Lishui County, in the treatise on taxes and relief, records: "In the sixteenth year of the Wanli reign of the Shenzong emperor, a great famine; the magistrate Du Xunji petitioned for treasury funds to build the Fengxian polder, and the starving people relied on it." It follows that a polder named Fengxian existed in the south of the county in the Wanli period. Volume 5 of the Kangxi Gazetteer of Lishui County, in the treatise on mountains and rivers, records all nineteen wells of the county one by one, among them "Hanhu Well, fifteen li to the southeast" and "Twin Eyes Well, below Caojia Hill in the east of the county"; the card notes that these two wells lie in the Hefeng and Honglan area. Qishan does not appear in the mountains category of that volume.

What must be emphasised is that place names such as Fengxian polder and Fengqi Mountain do have documentary support for a phoenix association in the old gazetteers, but those gazetteers record polder and mountain names and do not say whence the town name Hefeng derives; the legend on the town profile page remains a single unsupported account among the sources held here, and the old gazetteers do not record it. Therefore Fengxian polder, Fengqi Mountain and the like must not be used to confirm or refute the account of the name Hefeng; the two are of a different order.

Points of doubt

• The document behind the story, whether gazetteer, genealogy or oral record, is not stated; the gazetteers held here contain no record of the derivation of the town name Hefeng.
• Whether any account other than this one exists for the name is not recorded in the sources used here.
• This entry makes no inference about the position of Qishan relative to Shijiu Lake, nor about the precise spot where the phoenix is said to have alighted; the sources held here also do not state to which village or community Qishan now belongs.
• Whether the old place names containing the character for phoenix, such as Fengxian polder and Fengqi Mountain, share a source with the town name Hefeng is not recorded in the sources used here, and no inference is drawn.