Where is Mandarin spoken?

Putonghua is not a dialect but is the Mandarin spoken throughout the country.

Due to China’s vast territory and large population, each place has its own unique dialect. However, the phenomenon of "different pronunciations ten miles apart and different customs hundreds of miles apart" has seriously hindered normal communication and life between people. Therefore, after the founding of New China, our country created a standard language system, which is the popular Mandarin today. Many people think that the best place to speak Mandarin in China is in Beijing. Actually it is not, it is in this small county next to Beijing.

Starting from Beijing to the northeast, passing through Miyun, the first county we entered was Luanping County in Chengde, Hebei Province, which is also the protagonist we will introduce today. Luanping County first became associated with Mandarin in the early Ming Dynasty 600 years ago. At that time, due to continuous wars in the Central Plains, the people suffered heavy casualties. After Zhu Yuanzhang established the Ming Dynasty, he decided to implement an immigration policy in order to restore national strength. Luanping County, which was least affected by the war at that time, was one of the candidate places for immigration.

After Ming Chengzu succeeded in seizing the throne, he made the move to move the capital to Beijing. In order to defend the imperial army, he withdrew all the troops and residents outside Beigukou into the Great Wall. Since all the officials in Beijing at that time came from Nanjing, the Mandarin of the Ming Dynasty also used Jinling Yayin as the standard pronunciation. After Luanping moved inland, he was also influenced by the Jinling dialect. After the establishment of the Qing Dynasty, a large amount of construction work was carried out in Chengde to build a summer resort. Therefore, Luanping has also become an important channel from Beijing to Chengde.

For the sake of safety and profit, the Qing royal family set up Luanping as an imperial village and a farm under the direct management of the Royal Household Office. They also arranged for Eight Banners officers and soldiers to settle here and establish flag villages. Since the Manchus actively studied Chinese culture after entering the customs, they developed a new Beijing dialect based on the original Nanjing Mandarin. A large number of people who speak Beijing dialect came to Luanping, and over time they all became Beijing dialect. Since there are still some distance differences between the two places, there are still differences in dialects, that is, Luanping dialect does not have the Erhua sound.

In 1953, the No. 4 Primary School in Luanping County had just opened. Bai Fengran, who was only 14 years old, walked into the classroom and was called to the office by the teacher. In the office, he was asked by the teacher to read the text to two "strangers". Bai Fengran didn't know why, but he still did it. The two strangers listened to Bai Fengran's reading, with excited expressions on their faces, and they wrote something on the paper from time to time. Later, Bai Fengran gradually forgot about it.

But no one could have imagined that those two people were actually language experts sent by the State Council. They went to the countryside to engage in voice collection work. Through comparison, experts found that Luanping dialect has clear and precise pronunciation, correct characters and round accents, and a "harder" tone than Beijing dialect. It does not have the rhotic sounds in Beijing Hutongs and is easy to promote, so they decided to use Luanping dialect as a template.

Because everyone in Luanping County can speak Mandarin, Luanping County has now become the "Hometown of Mandarin", and many people are engaged in the broadcasting and hosting industry