Xiang

Xiang or Hsiang may refer to:

Xiang Chinese

Xiang (Hsiang, simplified Chinese: 湘语; traditional Chinese: 湘語) or imprecisely Hunanese (Chinese: 湖南话), is a group of linguistically similar and historically related varieties of Chinese, spoken mainly in Hunan province but also in a few parts of Guangxi, Sichuan and Shaanxi. Scholars divided Xiang into five subgroups, Chang-Yi, Lou-Shao, Hengzhou, Chen-Xu and Yong-Quan. Among those, Lou-shao, as known as Old Xiang, still exhibits the three-way distinction of Middle Chinese obstruents, preserving the voiced stops, fricatives, and affricates. Xiang has also been heavily influenced by Mandarin, which adjoins three of the four sides of the Xiang speaking territory, and Gan in Jiangxi Province, from where a large population immigrated to Hunan during the Ming Dynasty.

Xiang speakers played an important role in Modern Chinese history, especially in those reformatory and revolutionary movements such as Self-Strengthening Movement, Hundred Days' Reform, Xinhai Revolution and Chinese Communist Revolution. Some examples of Xiang speakers are Mao Zedong, Zuo Zongtang, Huang Xing and Ma Ying-jeou.

Xiang (place)

Xiang was a place in Guangxi province where there was an idol to Gan. Feeling that Gan was an embodiment of immorality and other evils, Hong Xiuquan, Lu Liu and Feng Yunshan destroyed the idol and desecrated the temple to Gan in the 1840s.

Xiang later became one of the early bases of the Taiping.

Sources

Spence, Jonathan. God's Chinese Son (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1996) p. 100, 110