What does Jiuquan mean?

Ancient laborers learned from the experience of drilling wells that if they dig deep underground, there will be springs. Groundwater oozes from loess, often with yellow color, so the ancients called the deep underground "yellow". In ancient times, there was a superstition that people would go to the underworld after death, and the underworld was deep underground, so the word "nine" was matched with the word "spring" to become "nine springs"

There has been a folk saying since ancient times that once a person dies, he will go to the "underworld" to "report". But "the underworld" is deep underground, so people often refer to the underworld as "the grave" and "the grave". So, where are the origins and differences between the two? According to Xu Shen's Shuo Wen Jie Zi in the Eastern Han Dynasty, "Yellow Death" and "Jiuquan" are synonyms with similar meanings, both of which refer to the crypt where people are buried after death. Because water permeates from the loess layer in the deep underground, and it is often yellow, the ancients called the deep underground "yellow". The earliest allusion in China's history is recorded in Zuo Zhuan's Hidden Year: "It's better to be buried in peace and have no meeting." In addition, the ancient people often used the word "nine" to mean "many, big and extreme", because "nine" is the largest number of Chinese characters in China. According to the ancient medical book Su Wen, "The number of heaven and earth begins with one and ends with nine." It can be seen that the so-called "nine days" and "nine days" refer to the unfathomable sky, which is extremely high; And "Jiuquan" refers to the bottomless underground, extremely deep. According to repeated textual research, the word "Jiuquan" appeared later than "Huang Quan" and was popular in the late Han Dynasty. There is a sentence in Ruan's poem "Seven Sorrow", one of the seven sons of Jian 'an, "I am in the grave, and the night is long. "Later, with the rise and fall of social politics, economy and culture, people used to call' yellow' and' grave' synonymous with the undead, which has been passed down to this day.