Spatial distribution, naming patterns, and formation mechanisms of Eastern Han toponymic heritage

Place names are a vital form of intangible cultural heritage, encoding territorial governance, geographic knowledge, and collective memory. While recent scholarship has examined Chinese toponymic heritage from late imperial and modern eras, the early imperial place-name system remains understudied, limiting its integration into the comparative literature on ancient toponymy. This study investigates Eastern Han dynasty (25-220 CE) toponymic heritage as preserved in the Hou Han Shu, analyzing 9633 toponym instances across administrative, geographic, settlement, and cultural categories. Administrative toponyms dominate the corpus (63.57%), exhibit high morphological standardization, and display systematic suffix-category associations (Cramér’s V = 0.41). Spatial-semantic analysis reveals a hierarchical differentiation pattern: higher administrative levels show strong negative semantic-geographic correlations (ρ = \(-\) 0.689), while county-level correlations approach zero. This gradient reflects a dual formation mechanism combining centralized semantic differentiation with local naming autonomy, providing the first corpus-scale quantitative evidence of how imperial governance shaped toponymic heritage.