Abstract: “East, west, south and north” are the most cardinal points of location. In Chinese language, however, “dong xi” (literally, east west) and “nan bei” (literally, south north) are asymmetrical in their respective used frequency, and their semantic evolutions are quite different as well. The meanings of “dong xi” evolve from “location” to “nearness” and then to “stuff”, while the term of “nan bei” derives from the meaning of “long distance” since there is a distance of 200,033,500 li plus 75 steps between north and south poles in ancients’ imagination.