"How come all those darn provinces sound the same, even the ones next to each other?"

- Soused Expat, Overheard in Watering Hole

Willful ignorance is much easier than learning, at least in the short term. If you've been in China a while, you probably know ‘Shanghai' means ‘on the sea', and ‘Beijing' means ‘North Capital'. And if you're one of those diligent souls who spent a year in intensive Mandarin study as soon as you unpacked your suitcase, then by all means back to your classic Confucian texts. The following is for the rest of us, who figure Hubei must be near Dongbei because, hey, ‘bei' means ‘north'.

Knowing your Hu's, He's, and Shan's constitutes a big step forward in "getting" China, as utterly impossible a goal as that is.

Hebei / Henan - North of the River/ South of the River

Which river? Not the mighty Yangtze but China's second longest, the Yellow River. Although it springs from the desolate Bayan Har mountains of Qinghai, and courses through nine provinces before emptying into the Bohai Sea, the Yellow River has a massive basin with the southern portion of Hebei and the northern portion of Henan at its heart. The area is termed "the cradle of Chinese civilization", but usually by those of northern Chinese extraction, whereas elders from Guangzhou to Shanghai maintain there has never been any true culture north of the Yangtze.

Peking Man, Shang oracle bones, and China's first Buddhist temple would argue to the contrary, sharing origins in the great Northern China plain. The Yellow River owes its color to all the rich silt it carries from the Loess Plateau. This was the critical ingredient in the region's early agricultural richness, and the cultural ferment that followed. The Yellow River has been a curse as well as a blessing, however. Yearly flooding is a perpetual concern. The 1887 flood killed between one and two million, and the 1931 flood is responsible for perhaps some four million lives. Nonetheless, the Yellow River has been an artery bringing life and sustenance to millions of Chinese since Emperor Huangdi wore silk short pants.

Hubei / Hunan - North of the Lake / South of the Lake

If you're tired of looking at Dongting Lake, just wait a while. A flood basin for the Yangtze River, the surface changes throughout the year, sometimes even during the same day, as concentric ridges of land rise and then submerge according to the fickle whims of nature.

Farmers shrewd enough to till land on the plains around Dongting Lake rather than on its peepshow islands were rewarded with rich soil, stable temperatures and abundant rain. Thus its kinship with Canaan in long being referred to as ‘a land of milk and honey'. The Xinjiang, Zishui, Yuanjiang, and Lishui Rivers all flow into it, leading to its more prosaic ‘holder of the four streams' nickname.

A lily of a lake by any name, Dongting is said to be the home of dragon boat racing, started on its eastern shores in hopes of finding the bloated remains of ancient poet Qu Yuan (340 - 278 BC). Then again, early boaters may have been hoping for a sighting of the dragon-king reputed to live in Dongting's deepest regions.

Of course, most of the boats on Dongting are employed for fishing. The fishing villages dotting South Dongting Lake, near Yuanjiang, are as quaint as China gets. Also eminently photo-worthy is Junshan, a former Daoist retreat on a mid-lake island with over seventy peaks, upon which grows prized Junshan yinzhen tea.

Shanxi / Shandong - West of the Mountain / East of the Mountain

These names are a little less pragmatic then the previous four; the Taihang mountain range to which the ‘Shan' refers runs over four hundred kilometers north to south along Hebei and the tip of Henan. Still, a trip between Shanxi and Shandong would veer far off course if one wished to avoid crossing the Taihang mountains, whose modest elevation between fifteen hundred and two thousand meters is topped by Xiao Wutaishan, which reaches nearly three thousand.

Today the Taihang mountains are easily flown over, but ‘the road over Taihang' has long been employed in China as a metaphor for life's many travails. Few passes, deep gorges, and dodgy roads mean that the mountain's settlements have managed to maintain their ‘nice place to visit, but...' authenticity. Wangjinzhuang, in Hebei's Shexian County, is one such rustic paradigm, a village carved entirely from stone. Houses, hutongs, even tables and benches have been hewn from the rock that lay there first, now shiny and smooth from contact with three centuries of heinies and hands.

Cangyan, or ‘Green Cliff' Mountain is another picturesque feature of the Taihang range. Some fifty kilometers south of Beijing satellite city Shijiazhuang, Canyang is thick with cypress forests, punctuated by ancient buildings clinging to the cliffs. Preeminent among them is Fu Qing Si Temple, a Sui Dynasty structure that lovers of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Tiger will recognize as the site of Zhang Ziyi's character's suicide leap.

Extensive coal mining mars the relatively pristine nature of Taihang, yet the holiday hiker who gives up Huangshan for a ramble there will be rewarded with idyllic spots such as Wenpanyu Gorge and Zifang Lake.

Guangxi/ Guangdong - West Expanse / East Expanse

The Qin Dynasty claimed these two regions back in 214 B.C. and, despite all the areas' diverse wonders, felt ‘expanse' did them justice as a label. Such is the stamp of China's first centralized, bureaucratic state.

* To finish the job of learning China's provinces, click here for a fun interactive quiz.