The historical local chronicles of Chongqing during the Ming and Qing dynasties as well as the Republic of China period valued both history and geography while also emphasizing humanities. The generic toponym characters best indicate the geographical type to which individual toponym belongs, and accommodates the changes in natural and social characteristics of the southwest region in China. The Grand Dictionary of Chinese Characters is an authoritative large-scale Chinese language dictionary, serving as a bridge between national language norms and the reality of people’s spoken language. It focuses on reflecting the origin, evolution, and actual usage of toponymic characters, but has quite limited absorption and utilization of toponymic materials from local chronicles. In order to investigate the lexicological value of local chronicles, this article uses the historical local chronicles of Chongqing to supplement the pronunciation, explaination, use cases, and inter-character relationships of the generic toponym characters compiled in The Grand Dictionary of Chinese Characters.

Fanqie (反切) is a traditional method of indicating the pronunciation of a Chinese character by using two other Chinese characters, one having the same consonant as the given character and the other having the same vowel (with or without final nasal) and tone. There are seven problematic aspects regarding Fanqie (反切) phonetic notation of polyphonic characters in The Grand Chinese Dictionary, 漢語大詞典. The first, the cited Chinese characters used as phonetic notations are wrong; the second, the attributions of phonological status about some polyphonic characters are not correct; the third, one or two phonetic notations are missing among several pronunciations of the polyphones; the fourth, the materials for phonetic evidences are neglected; the fifth, the evidences of some ancient sounds are lagging because of not finding the earliest evidence in citing ancient sound; the sixth, the main sounds and the secondary ones are reversed; and the last, the selected Chinese characters are not appropriate in some Fanqie phonetics.