Tianweiban

Tianweiban, formerly known as Tianmeidong, is a village in Donglu Town, Wenchang County, Hainan, China with a population of roughly 50 people in 10 households. Its inhabitants changed their village's name in 2007 on the advice of a feng shui master, in hopes that it would bring them prosperity; even the villagers themselves were not entirely clear on the meaning of the new name of their hometown, only knowing that the obscure final character was pronounced the same as "to bump ()" in their local dialect of Hainanese.cite news|url=http://www.takungpao.com.hk/news/07/08/22/ZM-784189.htm|publisher=Ta Kung Pao|date=2007-08-22|accessdate=2007-08-23|title=小村改怪名 村民無法辦身份證] The change began to cause inconvenience for the villagers because officials did not know how to enter the character into computers; villagers found themselves unable to obtain identity cards, marriage certificates, and other documents as a result. [cite news|url=http://www.hq.xinhuanet.com/news/2007-08/13/content_10840851.htm|title=海南文昌：电脑不识村名 村民二代证难办|publisher=Xinhua News Agency|date=2007-08-13|accessdate=2007-08-23] The final character in the village name, which means "deep mud", is present in the Big5 standard commonly used for traditional Chinese characters, where it has the code D5E4, as well as in Unicode, where its codepoint is U+6E74. [cite dictionary|title=湴|encyclopedia=Chinese Character Database: With Word-formations Phonologically Disambiguated According to the Cantonese Dialect|url=http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/lexi-can/search.php?q=%D5%E4|publisher=Chinese University of Hong Kong|date=1998] cite dictionary|url=http://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/GetUnihanData.pl?codepoint=6E74|title=Unihan data for U+6E74|encyclopedia=Unihan Database|publisher=Unicode, Inc.|date=2007|accessdate=2007-08-23] Although it is absent from GB 2312, an old character encoding standard used in the People's Republic of China, the newer character sets GBK and GB 18030, which supersede GB 2312, do contain the character, encoded as 9CB0. [cite web|last=Shinyama|first=Yusuke|title=Unicode to GB2312 or GBK table|url=http://cs.nyu.edu/~yusuke/tools/unicode_to_gb2312_or_gbk_table.html| accessdate=2007-09-13] News reports in both China and Hong Kong referred to the character by describing its shape, rather than printing the actual character in question. [cite news|url=http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/08/21/asia/AS-ODD-China-Name-Trouble.php|publisher=International Herald Tribune|date=2007-08-21|title=Chinese village changes name to improve its fortunes; Chaos, inconvenience ensues|accessdate=2007-08-23]

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