Wenzhou in the context of "Zhejiang"

Fujian is a province in southeastern China. Fujian is bordered by Zhejiang to the north, Jiangxi to the west, Guangdong to the south, and the Taiwan Strait to the east. Its capital is Fuzhou and its largest prefecture city by population is Quanzhou, with other notable cities including the port city of Xiamen and Zhangzhou. Fujian is located on the west coast of the Taiwan Strait as the closest province geographically and culturally to Taiwan. This is as a result of the Chinese Civil War. Additionally, a small portion of historical Fujian is administered by Taiwan, romanized as Fuchien.

While the population predominantly identifies as Han, it is one of China's most culturally and linguistically diverse provinces. The dialects of the language group Min Chinese are most commonly spoken within the province, including the Fuzhou dialect and Eastern Min of Northeastern Fujian province and various Southern Min and Hokkien dialects of southeastern Fujian. The capital city of Fuzhou and Fu'an of Ningde prefecture along with Cangnan county-level city of Wenzhou prefecture in Zhejiang province make up the Min Dong linguistic and cultural region of Northeastern Fujian. Hakka Chinese is also spoken in Fujian, by the Hakka people. Min dialects, Hakka, and Standard Chinese are mutually unintelligible. Due to emigration, much of the ethnic Chinese populations of Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines speak Southern Min (or Hokkien).

Chinese temple architecture refer to a type of structures used as place of worship of Chinese Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, or Chinese folk religion, where people revere ethnic Chinese gods and ancestors. They can be classified as:

• miào (廟) or diàn (殿), simply means "temple" and mostly enshrines gods of the Chinese pantheon, such as the Dragon King, Tudigong or Matsu; or mythical or historical figures, such as Guandi or Shennong.
• cí (祠), cítáng (祠堂), zōngcí (宗祠) or zǔmiào (祖廟), referring to ancestral temples, mostly enshrining the ancestral gods of a family or clan.
• Taoist temples and monasteries: 觀 guàn or 道觀 dàoguàn; and
• Chinese Buddhist temples and monasteries: 寺 sì or 寺院 sìyuàn
• Temple of Confucius which usually functions as both temple and town school: 文廟 wénmiào or 孔廟 kŏngmiào.
• Temples of City God (城隍廟), which worships the patron God of a village, town or a city.
• Smaller household shrines or votive niche, such as the worship of Zaoshen and Caishen.

Gōng (宮), meaning "palace" is a term used for a templar complex of multiple buildings, while yuàn (院), meaning "institution," is a generic term meaning "sanctuary" or "shrine". Táng (堂) means courtyard or room, and ān (庵) means dome or nunnery.

Standard Chinese, like many Sinitic varieties, has a significant number of homophonous syllables and words due to its limited phonetic inventory. The Cihai dictionary lists 149 characters representing the syllable "yì". (However, modern Chinese words average about two syllables, so the high rate of syllable homophony does not cause a problem for communication.) Many Chinese take great delight in using the large amount of homophones in the language to form puns, and they have become an important component of Chinese culture. In Chinese, homophones are used for a variety of purposes from rhetoric and poetry to advertisement and humor, and are also common in Chinese loans, for example phono-semantic matching of brand names, computer jargon, technological terms and toponyms.

This article lists common homophonous puns in Mandarin Chinese, though many of the examples given are homophones in other varieties as well. Asterisks before the entry denote near-homophones.

Jiangnan is a geographic area in China referring to lands immediately to the south of the lower reaches of the Yangtze River, including the southern part of its delta. The region encompasses the city of Shanghai, the southern part of Jiangsu Province, the southeastern part of Anhui Province, the northern part of Jiangxi Province and Zhejiang Province. The most important cities in the area include Anqing, Changzhou, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Ningbo, Shaoxing, Suzhou, Wuxi, Wenzhou, Yangzhou and Zhenjiang.

Jiangnan has long been regarded as one of the most prosperous regions in China due to its wealth in trade and very high human development. Most people of the region speak Wu Chinese dialects as their native languages.

Taihu Wu (吳語太湖片) or Northern Wu (北部吳語) is a Wu Chinese language spoken in much of the southern part of the province of Jiangsu, including Suzhou, Wuxi, Changzhou, the southern part of Nantong, Jingjiang and Danyang; the municipality of Shanghai; and the northern part of Zhejiang province, including Hangzhou, Shaoxing, Ningbo, Huzhou, and Jiaxing. A notable exception is the dialect of the town of Jinxiang, which is a linguistic exclave of Taihu Wu in Zhenan Min-speaking Cangnan county of Wenzhou prefecture in Zhejiang province. Speakers in regions around Taihu Lake and Hangzhou Bay, are the largest population among all Wu speakers. Taihu Wu dialects such as Shanghainese, Shaoxing and Ningbo are mutually intelligible even for L2 Taihu speakers.

Zhenan Min (simplified Chinese: 浙南闽语; traditional Chinese: 浙南閩語; pinyin: Zhènán Mǐnyǔ; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: Chiat-lâm-bân-gí; lit. 'Min language in southern Zhejiang'), is a variety of Southern Min spoken in the vicinity of Wenzhou, in the southeast of Zhejiang province, China.

The Zhenan Min people had settled in areas such as Cangnan County, Pingyang County, Yuhuan County and Dongtou County from Fujian Province as early as the Tang dynasty period (618–907) and new waves of immigrants continued during the Southern Song dynasty, Ming dynasty and the Qing dynasty periods.

Ningde, previously romanized as Ningteh and Ning-Taik, is a city located along the northeastern coast of Fujian, China. It borders the provincial capital of Fuzhou City to the south, Wenzhou Prefecture of Zhejiang to the north, and Nanping to the west.

The prefecture-level Ningde City administers 1 district, 2 cities, 6 counties, as well as 124 towns, townships and subdistricts. Listed below are the district, cities and counties, first four of which are coastal whereas the rest are located in mountainous areas.

Cangnan County (simplified Chinese: 苍南县; traditional Chinese: 蒼南縣; pinyin: Cāngnán Xiàn Pronunciation of "Cangnan") is a county in the prefecture-level city of Wenzhou in southern Zhejiang, China. The county government is in Lingxi. Cangnan has 20 towns, 14 townships, and two nationality townships. Cangnan and Taishun are a part of the Min Dong, Eastern Min cultural region of Zhejiang province. Wenzhou dialect and Jinxiang dialect, are also spoken.

Founded in 1981, Cangnan County is the south gate of Zhejiang Province, the major birthplace of the “Wenzhou Pattern” as well as an open door to the outside world authorised by the State Council. Its total land area is 1,261 square kilometres and its sea area is 3,783 square kilometres. Governing 10 towns, two minority towns and with a registered population of 1.3 million people, it is the most populous county in Zhejiang. In 2014, the county realised a GDP of US$6.3bn and total fiscal revenue of US$658m.