Originally Posted by
Tainan Mantis
Since Robert's post more information has been made available.
For example you find that Liang Xuexiang called his form Bing Bu. Maybe in a local dialect Bing was pronounced Beng, there are certainly many instances of Yantai dialect differing greatly from the standardized chinese language, but the character he uses, 掤 is not found in modern dictionaries. It can mean a 'quiver' where one would store arrows.
I don't think that was his intended meaning though, instead I think he followed a custom of that era to use the characters in a phonetic context and in fact you can find many instances of this in his, as well as a lot of other non-scholarly work from the Qing Dynasty era.
This type of phonetic application of Chinese characters is now rare owing to the modified and improved education system since those days.