Genealogies of a River: Yellow River Place Names, Heritage-Making, and Spatialized Memory in Contemporary China

How do ordinary place names make a major river legible as heritage? This article examines Yellow River toponyms as everyday infrastructures through which hydrological space becomes spatialized memory in contemporary China. The study uses a nested mixed-methods design rather than treating every record as equivalent evidence. Its administrative frame contains 2249 unique current statutory township-level units in 178 county-level targets across all nine Yellow River province-level regions. A record-level audit links 1039 of the original 1314 survey records to 1008 unique current units, while 1215 units contain at least one place-specific interpretive field. Six non-exclusive tags identify hydrological space, multi-ethnic interaction, transport and trade, historical memory, state governance, and cross-cutting heritage activation. An E0–E3 rubric separates administrative identity from externally corroborated explanation, traceable survey narrative, and structural context. Forty-five cases form an evidence-graded pool, but only seven core and eleven qualified cases carry the main qualitative argument. Hydrological and historical narratives are the most widely supported layers, while interpretive coverage remains geographically and evidentially uneven. Place names make river heritage through localization, multilingual translation, mobility, temporal layering, and administrative circulation. Official standardization can preserve recognized forms, but it also produces selective legibility by making some variants, scripts, meanings, and origin accounts easier to retrieve than others. The article contributes to critical toponymy and critical heritage studies by showing how ordinary names mediate between local memory and national spatial infrastructures. It reframes the Global East as a setting where heritage is produced through accretion, translation, and database-mediated standardization, not only spectacular renaming.