鄉

xiāng

country; rural; village; hometown

Meaning

Administrative: A formal jurisdictional unit, such as a township or district.
Geographic/Qualitative: The countryside or rural areas (often contrasted with 城 "walled city"); can function as an attributive meaning rustic or provincial.
Personal/Ancestral: One's place of origin, native land, or ancestral home.

Grammar and usage

Functions primarily as a noun or an attributive noun.
In compounds (e.g., 同鄉), it serves as a marker of shared social identity or origin rather than a physical location.

Distinctions

鄉 vs. 村: While both may be rendered as "village," 鄉 typically carries administrative weight and denotes a broader scale, whereas 村 is generally more localized and concrete.

History and forms

Semantic variants include U+90F7 and U+9115.
Simplified form: U+4E61.

Translator notes

When encountering this glyph, determine if the text is mapping a jurisdiction (township), describing a landscape (rural), or evoking an identity (hometown).

Decontextualized translator aid. This page describes plausible lexical range; it does not choose what the glyph means in a particular passage.