Upon me first arriving in Guiyang I often exercised my innate curiosity, trying to ask the locals about names of places and their connection to history. What I usually got as an answer was “it’s just a name, it means nothing” or, “it’s based on the phonetic sound of the characters, they are random”. I assume many people would just give up, but having my academic background and having dealt with similar responses in the past, I knew these were not the right answers. . . .