Can anybody decipher one of the characters in a name of a city in Hebei province?

[DenLee]

Hi!

Is there anybody who can read this traditional Chinese character? It's most probably a town or village existing sometime between 1896~1959 (maybe even today, I don't know) in Hebei province, China.

It is an inscription on a gravestone describing where the deceased person was from. He was born in 1896 and died in 1959. It reads:

河北省 通 x 人民

http://postimage.org/image/lbwaf3dpb/

Thank you!

[Kobo-Daishi]

I can't make it out from the picture. Maybe if you made a rubbing or use something to fill in the grooves so they'd stand out temporarily for your photograph then it would be easier for us to decipher.

Oh, and the last character isn't min2, "people" but shi4, "clan".

Sorry, couldn't be of more help.

Kobo.

[外国赤佬]

It's 县, 通县. And 人氏 means a person native to a particular place.

[DenLee]

Thank you! Yes, I misread the 氏 character by mistake, thanks.

But are you sure it's 通县? The second hanzi doesn't really look like 县 to me...

[DenLee]

OK, I think we've got the mystery solved.

The character seems like a mixture of the traditional 縣 (the upper part) and the simplified 县 (the lower part). Maybe the writer has gotten confused somehow? He should have been Chinese, but that's still possible. And it really looks like those two characters put together. What do you think?

[外国赤佬]

通县 is a real place in Hebei.

Yes, I thought about this too. It was probably written in traditional originally, then someone tried to "simplify" it.

[DenLee]

OK, thanks for confirming our thoughts!

The gravestone is actually the gravestone of my Chinese great grandfather buried in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia (and I'm not Chinese at all, I live in the Czech Republic). I just came to Ulaanbaatar to search for it, have found it, and plan to repaint it tomorrow. So it was important for me to be able to read that strange character to paint it correctly.

Thank you!