Talk:Fuzhou

Districts?

Several {{movetodistrict}} tags were recently added. I promptly removed them because Fuzhou does not have districts in the Wikivoyage sense of the term & in my view does not need them. If someone wants to start a districting discussion, OK but I'd oppose.

As usual in China there's an ambiguity between the city and the surrounding prefecture. I do not think we need a Fuzhou (prefecture) article since if we were to create one it would just redirect to the city anyway. There are places like Mawei, Fuqing and Changle that are districts or counties of Fuzhou in terms of Chinese administration but separate towns for all practical purposes. They currently have WV articles as separate towns.

I think the current structure is fine, but since I created it that is not surprising. It is conceivable I'm just being a curmudgeon here, but if anyone wants a different structure we'll need discussion first. Pashley (talk) 11:12, 14 March 2014 (UTC)

Is the issue that there is both a city (in the traditional sense) and a prefecture both called Fuzhou? I guess my question really is, if we treat Mawei and the others listed here as separate locations, why do they need to be listed here as if they were parts of this city? Why not forget trying to educate travellers on the administrative idiosyncracies and just list them only in Northern Coast (Fujian)? And if there is not actually a city in the traditional sense called Fuzhou, why do we even need this article? Wouldn't Northern Coast (Fujian) be enough in that case? It doesn't have that many cities under it anyway. Texugo (talk) 11:33, 14 March 2014 (UTC)

There is definitely a city called Fuzhou, centuries old, one of China's major cities, provincial capital, Marco Polo mentions it, ... There is also a prefecture centered on it; this sort of thing is pervasive in China, irritatingly ambiguous to visitors but quite normal to Chinese.

The current "Districts" section describes the official administrative structure for the prefecture. I'll try to clarify that, but a plausible alternative would be to scrap the section. Pashley (talk) 12:02, 14 March 2014 (UTC)

As someone who knows nothing about China's administrative structure, I think that if understanding that administrative structure does not provide any particular travel-related value, it would be best to forget that section and deal with it as if it were any place else, with a simple region and cities schematic. This kind of thing comes up in Brazil a lot too, where a small place is technically a district of another place but is physically removed from it, and I always just treat them as separate places, and forget the technical administrative side because it just confuses our hierarchy without benefiting the traveller. Texugo (talk) 12:20, 14 March 2014 (UTC)

Some areas have their own WP stubs, e.g. w:Yongtai County and w:Minhou County, and might eventually have separate articles here; Yongtai is very scenic with a big waterfall and Minhou has half a dozen universities that all employ foreign teachers.

I think for China region articles on the prefectures are unnecessary in most cases and "just treat them as separate places" is the right solution for most of the smaller places. I do think an explanation of the prefecture structure adds a bit of travel-related value in some cases, though, including here. See the Districts section since my latest edits. Pashley (talk) 12:29, 14 March 2014 (UTC)

Hmm. Not sure I see what the value is in this case. What would help more than anything is a map I guess. Incidentally, if Mawei is a district of the city proper, why does it get its own article while the other districts don't? Texugo (talk) 12:36, 14 March 2014 (UTC)

Administratively, it is a district but practically it's a separate town. People say they are "going to Mawei"; they don't say that for other districts, only occasionally use them in addresses. Look at the dynamic map on the Mawei article and back out a bit to see its relation to the city. Pashley (talk) 12:40, 14 March 2014 (UTC)

I see. That is a case where it would be clearer to me if the attempted explanation/section in the parent article were left out and it were treated as a separate destination. The fact that it's technically part of Fuzhou could just be mentioned as an aside in its lede. ~~

I guess what I don't understand is: why would I care who administers what, and why is it so important to the traveller that it's worth adapting our hierarchy to it? Texugo (talk) 13:15, 14 March 2014 (UTC)

Also we need some overall clarity on how to structure these because it is just confusing. If Fuzhou does not have districts in the Wikivoyage sense of the term thaen that is fine, please define what it is!

Fuzhou is at the top of a hierarchy of sub-articles (Chinese categorizations are irrelevant), and therefore should have NO listings. If Mawei is a sub article of Fuzou then listings need to move down. {{movetodistrict}} is completely valid.

If however Fuzou and Mawei are separate entities then they should be peers on the hierarchy. What we can't have is both.

Am I missing something? Andrewssi2 (talk) 01:33, 15 March 2014 (UTC)

My suggestion would be:

A) Remove the confusing 'District' part from Fuzou

B) Add some further clarification to the 'Cities' section in Northern Coast (Fujian) as to what the Fuzou prefecture is.

Does this work? Andrewssi2 (talk) 01:42, 15 March 2014 (UTC)

This is a pervasive problem in China. See Talk:China#Merge_districts_and_prefecture_cities.3F and Talk:Dengfeng for other discussions.

Our article on Fujian (the province Fuzhou is capital of) has:

"Fujian is divided administratively into nine regions. Eight of them are prefectures, each around a central city and named for the city. For the ninth, Xiamen, there is no separate prefecture, just the city."

We could have separate articles for Fuzhou and Fuzhou (prefecture) so that Mawei and other such articles could be tagged as IsPartOf the prefecture. I do not think that is necessary; it would mean creating eight almost-empty articles just in Fujian just so we could breadcrumb through them. Probably at least 100 for China as a whole. Mawei's breadcrumb is currently to Northern Coast (Fujian) and that is fine.

Fuzhou is not "at the top of a hierarchy of sub-articles", nor should it be. In WV terms, Mawei is not a district of Fuzhou, though in Chinese admin terms it is. It is 20 km out of town. Changle and Fuqing are administratively counties of Fuzhou (prefecture), but they are separate towns each about half a million people and an hour's travel from the city.

The {{movetodistrict}} tags were absurd; there are no defined WV districts to move things to and I don't think we need any. All the listings I've looked at are in the city, not Mawei or Fuqing or ... so they belong in the city article.

As I see it, the current structure is fine. The Fuzhou article covers the city but mentions the prefecture in the Districts section, which is also OK now that I've clarified it some. 03:08, 15 March 2014 (UTC)

I think the core of the matter is simply that the Chinese administrative divisions simply do not fit WV that well. I do believe however that you are attempting to conflate the Fuzhou Prefecture and the Fuzhou metropolitan area in a manner which I find quite confusing. Quite simply I don't think this article should have a 'districts' section if there are, (as you say yourself) no districts.

Can we compromise and at least create the Fuzhou (prefecture) article? We have been removing those in inner Mongolia, however those only has one metro area within one prefecture. In this case we are looking at multiple metropolitan areas within a prefecture. Andrewssi2 (talk) 13:40, 15 March 2014 (UTC)

Done. I also created Fuzhou Prefecture as a redirect & think perhaps that should have been the article title. Pashley (talk) 14:56, 15 March 2014 (UTC)

Great, thanks. Andrewssi2 (talk) 05:33, 16 March 2014 (UTC)

Renewed discussion

I am sorry, I missed out on the last couple of day of this discussion. I have undone the creation of Fuzhou (prefecture) and think we need to discuss further. How could we ever have full, nice articles on both the prefecture and the city? They would contain almost exactly the same content. Texugo (talk) 15:43, 24 April 2014 (UTC)

The problem is pervasive in China (some links above) and we need a general policy/solution, not different ad hoc choices for each city, Examples include:

• (from the now-redirected prefecture article) In terms of administrative divisions, Fuzhou has the typical Chinese structure. There is no separate government specifically for the city of Fuzhou; instead the Fuzhou officials administer the entire prefecture, which is divided into urban districts and more-or-less rural counties. Each district or county has its own local administration. The person who gets called "mayor of Fuzhou" in English is actually the chief administrator for the prefecture.

That structure really is typical; it applies to most Chinese cities, and Chinese contributors routinely add lists of the districts.

• There are also "prefecture-level cities" where there is no distinction between city and prefecture. See Talk:Xiamen#Districts.3F for an example of the simpler but still problematic districting questions for those.
• (from Shanghai#Districts) In terms of administration, Shanghai is one of four cities in China that are not part of provinces but instead are treated as municipalities (市) at the same hierarchical level as provinces (discussion). There is no government structure at province, city or prefecture level, just Shanghai Municipality with 16 districts and one county within it.

Places like Mawei, Changle and Fuqing are under Fuzhou in the Chinese system, in many ways suburbs; the terms involved get translated as "districts" or "counties". People from any of them say they are from Fuzhou; Changle has the Fuzhou airport & Mawei the seaport. Mawei is even reachable by city bus. To a Chinese, there is nothing ambiguous about this; those places are "part of Fuzhou".

But none of them would work as "districts" in the WV sense. Changle and Fuqing are half a million each and an hour's drive from Fz. Mawei is smaller and closer, but still distinct; I therefore created separate articles for them.

My take on this would be that in general we should not have prefecture articles; just do a city article and mention any important districts or counties there. However, when some of the districts have their own articles, we should add a prefecture article. An alternative would be to just link to these areas; see Quanzhou#Districts for an example. Pashley (talk) 16:54, 24 April 2014 (UTC)

The traveller genuinely has no more reason to know what prefecture in China they are in than they do to know what county they are in when visiting Wyoming or what microregião they are in when visiting Ouro Preto — it just doesn't really matter what urban center is administered by what larger urban center. For the purposes of our hierarchy, we can basically ignore the unique Chinese system, just as we basically ignore the unique American one or the unique Brazilian one. The only things that matter are that:

• any given article is either a) a city article, i.e. an urban center of any size, be it a town, village, city, etc., b) an integral district of a huge city we have fully districtified, or c) a region
• we never have hybrid articles that are half-city-half-prefecture etc.
• we arrange all urban centers directly under a region article not under another urban center article;
• if our coverage of a single urban center is divided into districts, we use the huge city/district model, in which we fully divide up the whole city into comprehensive district articles
• when you have an urban center that is technically part of but is separate from another (like Mawei), we treat it as a separate city article, a destination in its own right, with an appropriate note that we have done so, and its breadcrumb points to the parent region article, not to the urban center that technically administers it

I don't see any convincing reason to use prefecture articles as regions unless there is already a need to subdivide the region and prefectures just happen to be the best way (as we do with counties for US regions). This means only cases where pretty much all of the following are true: a) there are too many existing articles to group under a single region, b) there is enough unique content to say about each prefecture to merit a separate article (i.e. they aren't just empty containers for arranging the breadcrumbs, nor will they all just repeat the same info common to all of them), c) the number of prefectures is reasonable for the number of bottom-destination levels we are trying to organize (i.e. we don't need 10 prefectures articles to hold 13 city articles). Not even one of those conditions is true for this case. Texugo (talk) 17:15, 24 April 2014 (UTC)

Star trek building

Chinese Star Trek fan build office in shape of the USS Enterprise needs to be added, I think to See section. Does anyone know where it is? Or have a good photo? Pashley (talk) 18:44, 3 June 2015 (UTC)

@Pashley Stumbled upon this now. A listing should be here if there isn't one already. I've stubbed this on en wiki: w:Enterprise Building (China) Piotrus (talk) 11:15, 14 October 2023 (UTC)

The Enterprise Building is in Changle District. I note that we currently have a separate article on Changle District. STW932 (talk) 05:40, 15 October 2023 (UTC)

Fair. There then, not here. Pretty sad article. Maybe one day my students will improve it :) Piotrus (talk) 07:11, 16 October 2023 (UTC)

I finally got around to adding a listing for the Enterprise Building in the Changle District article. Please feel free to edit it if you wish. STW932 (talk) 09:35, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

Metro updates?

Current text includes:

Extension to Line 1 will open in late 2020, Line 5 and Line 6 will open in 2021.

Did these open? Are others open or coming? Pashley (talk) 09:26, 8 April 2022 (UTC)

I just had a quick look at some Chinese websites. The extension to Line 1 was opened on 27 December 2020. The other lines are still under construction but will be finished fairly soon. Line 5 is expected to open at the end of this month while Line 6 is due for completion in October. Another line currently under construction is Line 4, which won't be completed until around September 2023. STW932 (talk) 17:44, 8 April 2022 (UTC)

I've updated the text. Someone else will need to update the map. Line 5 officially opened on April 29th. STW932 (talk) 15:32, 11 May 2022 (UTC)

Districts again

Some time back we deleted a Districts section, discussion at #Districts? and #Renewed discussion above. Later someone added some district info under "Get around".

I moved that info then edited it rather heavily to create a new Fuzhou#Districts section. Comment solicited. Pashley (talk) 17:20, 23 November 2023 (UTC)