Postal romanization was a system of transliterating
Chinese place names developed by postal authorities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For many cities, the corresponding postal romanization was the most common English-language form of the city's name from the 1890s until the 1980s, when postal romanization was replaced by
pinyin
Hanyu Pinyin (), often shortened to just pinyin, is the official romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese in China, and to some extent, in Singapore and Malaysia. It is often used to teach Mandarin, normally written in Chinese fo ...
, but the system remained in place on
Taiwan
Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia, at the junction of the East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, with the People's Republic of China (PRC) to the northwest, Japan to the northe ...
until 2002.
In 1892,
Herbert Giles created a romanization system called
Nanking syllabary. The
Imperial Maritime Customs Post Office
The Chinese Maritime Customs Service was a Chinese governmental tax collection agency and information service from its founding in 1854 until it split in 1949 into services operating in the Republic of China on Taiwan, and in the People's Repu ...
would cancel postage with a stamp that gave the city of origin in Latin letters, often romanized using Giles's system. In 1896, the Customs Post was combined with other postal services and renamed the
Chinese Imperial Post. As a national agency, the Imperial Post was an authority on Chinese place names.
When the
Wade–Giles
Wade–Giles () is a romanization system for Mandarin Chinese. It developed from a system produced by Thomas Francis Wade, during the mid-19th century, and was given completed form with Herbert A. Giles's '' Chinese–English Dictionary'' o ...
system of romanization became widespread, some argued that the post office should adopt it. This idea was rejected at a conference held in 1906 in
Shanghai
Shanghai (; , , Standard Mandarin pronunciation: ) is one of the four direct-administered municipalities of the People's Republic of China (PRC). The city is located on the southern estuary of the Yangtze River, with the Huangpu River flowin ...
. Instead, the conference formally adopted Nanking syllabary. This decision allowed the post office to continue to use various romanizations that it had already selected. Wade-Giles romanization is based on the
Beijing dialect
The Beijing dialect (), also known as Pekingese and Beijingese, is the prestige dialect of Mandarin spoken in the urban area of Beijing, China. It is the phonological basis of Standard Chinese, the official language in the People's Republic of ...
, a pronunciation standard since the 1850s. The use of Nanking syllabary did not suggest that the post office considered Nanjing pronunciation to be standard. Rather, it was an attempt to accommodate a variety of Mandarin pronunciations with a single romanization system.
Table of romanizations
Pronunciation key for postal: ''a'' as in father. ''ai'' as in ''aye''. ''e'' as in m''e''n or y''e''t. ê as in ''ea''rth. ''eh'' is short and abrupt. ''ei'' as in h''ei''ght. ''ew'' as in s''ou''ce. ''eul'' as in h''ul''l. ''i'' as in p''i''n. ''ia'' as in ''ya''rd. ''iao'' is ''i'' and ''ao'' together. ''ie'' as in the Italian word s''ei''sta. ''ieh'' same sound as ''ie'', but shorter. ''ih'' as in ch''i''ck. ''in'' as in p''in'' or ch''in''. ''ing'' as in k''ing'' or s''ing''. ''io'' as in ''yaw''n. ''ioh'' is short and abrupt. ''iu'' as in p''ew''. ''o'' as in l''o''ng. ''oh'' is short or abrupt. ''ow'' as in h''ow'', but longer. ''u'' as in t''oo''. ''ch'' as in church. ''chw'' as in chew. ''f'' as in ''f''at. ''h'' as in ''h''ang. ''hs'' as in ''sh''in. ''hw'' as in ''wh''at. ''j'' as in French ''j''amais. ''k'' as in ''k''ing. ''l'' as in ''l''amp.
The spelling "Amoy" is based on pronunciation of
Xiamen
Xiamen ( , ; ), also known as Amoy (, from Hokkien pronunciation ), is a sub-provincial city in southeastern Fujian, People's Republic of China, beside the Taiwan Strait. It is divided into six districts: Huli, Siming, Jimei, Tong' ...
in
Amoy
Xiamen ( , ; ), also known as Amoy (, from Hokkien pronunciation ), is a sub-provincial city in southeastern Fujian, People's Republic of China, beside the Taiwan Strait. It is divided into six districts: Huli, Siming, Jimei, Tong'an, ...
Hokkien
The Hokkien () variety of Chinese is a Southern Min language native to and originating from the Minnan region, where it is widely spoken in the south-eastern part of Fujian in southeastern mainland China. It is one of the national languages ...
, the local language of
Xiamen (Amoy). "Peking" is carried over from the d'Anville map. In Nanking syllabary, the city is ''Pehking''. The irregular "oo" in "Soochow" is to distinguish this city from
Xuzhou
Xuzhou (徐州), also known as Pengcheng (彭城) in ancient times, is a major city in northwestern Jiangsu province, China. The city, with a recorded population of 9,083,790 at the 2020 census (3,135,660 of which lived in the built-up area ma ...
(Suchow) in northern Jiangsu. The other postal romanizations are based on "Southern Mandarin," an idealized form of
Nanjing dialect
The Nanjing dialect, also known as Nankinese, or Nanjing Mandarin, is a dialect of Mandarin Chinese spoken in Nanjing, China. It is part of the Jianghuai group of Chinese varieties.
Phonology
A number of features distinguish the Nanjing dialec ...
.
Pinyin
Hanyu Pinyin (), often shortened to just pinyin, is the official romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese in China, and to some extent, in Singapore and Malaysia. It is often used to teach Mandarin, normally written in Chinese fo ...
spellings are based on ''
putonghua'', an idealization of
Beijing dialect
The Beijing dialect (), also known as Pekingese and Beijingese, is the prestige dialect of Mandarin spoken in the urban area of Beijing, China. It is the phonological basis of Standard Chinese, the official language in the People's Republic of ...
taught in the Chinese education system.
After the
Chinese Nationalist Party came to power in 1927, the capital was moved from Peking ("northern capital") to Nanking ("southern capital"). Peking was renamed "Peiping" ("northern peace").
History
The Customs Post, China's first government-run post office, opened to the public and began issuing postage stamps in 1878. This office was part of the
Imperial Maritime Customs Service, led by Irishman
Robert Hart. By 1882, the Customs Post had offices in twelve
Treaty Ports:
Shanghai
Shanghai (; , , Standard Mandarin pronunciation: ) is one of the four direct-administered municipalities of the People's Republic of China (PRC). The city is located on the southern estuary of the Yangtze River, with the Huangpu River flowin ...
,
Amoy
Xiamen ( , ; ), also known as Amoy (, from Hokkien pronunciation ), is a sub-provincial city in southeastern Fujian, People's Republic of China, beside the Taiwan Strait. It is divided into six districts: Huli, Siming, Jimei, Tong'an, ...
,
Chefoo,
Chinkiang,
Chungking
Chongqing ( or ; ; Sichuanese pronunciation: , Standard Mandarin pronunciation: ), alternately romanized as Chungking (), is a municipality in Southwest China. The official abbreviation of the city, "" (), was approved by the State Coun ...
,
Foochow,
Hankow,
Ichang,
Kewkiang,
Nanking
Nanjing (; , Mandarin pronunciation: ), alternately romanized as Nanking, is the capital of Jiangsu province of the People's Republic of China. It is a sub-provincial city, a megacity, and the second largest city in the East China region. ...
,
Weihaiwei, and
Wuhu. Local offices had postmarking equipment so mail was marked with a romanized form of the city's name. In addition, there were companies that provided local postal service in each of these cities.
''
A Chinese-English Dictionary'' by Herbert Giles, published in 1892, popularized the Wade-Giles method of transliteration. This system had been created by
Thomas Francis Wade in 1867. It is based on pronunciation in Beijing. Giles's dictionary also gives pronunciation in the dialects of various other cities, allowing the reader to create locally-based transliteration. From January 1893 to September 1896, local postal services issued postage stamps that featured the romanized name of the city they served using local pronunciation.
An imperial edict issued in 1896 designated the Customs Post a national postal service and renamed it the Chinese Imperial Post. The local post offices in the Treaty Ports were incorporated into the new service. The Customs Post was smaller than other postal services in China, such as the British. As the Imperial Post, it grew rapidly and soon became the dominant player in the market.
In 1899, Hart, as inspector general of posts, asked postmasters to submit romanizations for their districts. Although Hart asked for transliterations "according to the local pronunciation", most postmasters were reluctant to play lexicographer and simply looked up the relevant characters in a dictionary. The spellings that they submitted generally followed the Wade–Giles system, which was the standard method of transliteration at this time.
The post office published a draft romanization map in 1903.
Disappointed with the Wade-based map, Hart issued another directive in 1905. This one told postmasters to submit romanizations "not as directed by Wade, but according to accepted or usual local spellings." Local missionaries could be consulted, Hart suggested. However, Wade's system did reflect pronunciation in Mandarin-speaking areas.
Théophile Piry, a long-time customs manager, was appointed postal secretary in 1901. Appointing a French national to the top position fulfilled an 1898 commitment by China to "take into account the recommendations of the French government" when selecting staff for the post office. Until 1911, the post office remained part of the Maritime Customs Service, which meant that Hart was Piry's boss.
1906 conference
To resolve the romanization issue, Piry organized an Imperial Postal Joint-Session Conference in Shanghai in the spring of 1906. This was a joint postal and telegraphic conference. The conference resolved that existing spellings would be retained for names already transliterated. Accents, apostrophes, and hyphens would be dropped to facilitate telegraphic transmission. The requirement for addresses to be given in Chinese characters was dropped. For new transliterations, local pronunciation would be followed in Guangdong as well as in parts of Guangxi and Fujian. In other areas, a system called Nanking syllabary would be used.
Nanking syllabary is one of several transliteration systems presented by Giles to represent various local dialects. Nanjing had once been the capital and its dialect was, like that of Beijing, a pronunciation standard. But the decision to use Nanking syllabary was not intended to suggest that the post office recognized any specific dialect as standard. The
Southern Mandarin
Lower Yangtze Mandarin () is one of the most Linguistic divergence, divergent and least mutually-intelligible of the Mandarin languages, as it neighbours the Wu Chinese, Wu, Huizhou Chinese, Hui, and Gan Chinese, Gan groups of Sinitic languages. ...
dialect spoken in Nanjing makes more phonetic distinctions than other dialects. A romanization system geared to this dialect can be used to reflect pronunciation in a wider variety of dialects.
Southern Mandarin is widely spoken in both
Jiangsu
Jiangsu (; ; pinyin: Jiāngsū, alternatively romanized as Kiangsu or Chiangsu) is an eastern coastal province of the People's Republic of China. It is one of the leading provinces in finance, education, technology, and tourism, with its c ...
and
Anhui
Anhui , (; formerly romanized as Anhwei) is a landlocked province of the People's Republic of China, part of the East China region. Its provincial capital and largest city is Hefei. The province is located across the basins of the Yangtze River ...
provinces. In Giles' idealization, the speaker consistently makes various phonetic distinctions not made in Beijing dialect (or in the dialect of any other specific city). Giles created the system to encompass a range of dialects. For the French-led post office, an additional advantage of the system was that it allowed "the romanization of non-English speaking people to be met as far as possible," as Piry put it. That is to say, Piry considered the Wade-Giles system to be specific to English.
Atlases explaining postal romanization were issued in 1907, 1919, 1933, and 1936. The ambiguous result of the 1906 conference led critics to complain that postal romanization was idiosyncratic.
According to modern scholar Lane J. Harris:
What they have criticized is actually the very strength of postal romanization. That is, postal romanization accommodated local dialects and regional pronunciations by recognizing local identity and language as vital to a true representation of the varieties of Chinese orthoepy as evinced by the Post Office's repeated desire to transcribe according to "local pronunciation" or "provincial sound-equivalents".
Later developments
At the
Conference for the Unification of Reading Pronunciation in 1913, the idea of a national language with a standardized transregional phonology was approved. A period of turmoil followed as President
Yuan Shikai
Yuan Shikai (; 16 September 1859 – 6 June 1916) was a Chinese military and government official who rose to power during the late Qing dynasty and eventually ended the Qing dynasty rule of China in 1912, later becoming the Emperor of China. ...
reversed course and attempted to restore the teaching of
Classical Chinese
Classical Chinese, also known as Literary Chinese (古文 ''gǔwén'' "ancient text", or 文言 ''wényán'' "text speak", meaning
"literary language/speech"; modern vernacular: 文言文 ''wényánwén'' "text speak text", meaning
"literar ...
. Yuan died in 1916 and the Ministry of Education published a pronunciation standard now known as
Old National Pronunciation
The Old National Pronunciation () was the system established for the phonology of standard Chinese as decided by the Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation from 1913 onwards, and published in the 1919 edition of the ''Guóyīn Zìdiǎn' ...
for Guoyu in 1918. The post office reverted to Wade's system in 1920 and 1921. It was the era of the
May Fourth Movement
The May Fourth Movement was a Chinese anti-imperialist, cultural, and political movement which grew out of student protests in Beijing on May 4, 1919. Students gathered in front of Tiananmen (The Gate of Heavenly Peace) to protest the Chin ...
, when language reform was the rage. The post office adopted a dictionary by
William Edward Soothill as a reference. The Soothill-Wade system was used for newly created offices. Existing post offices retained their romanizations.
Critics described the Ministry's standard, now called
Old National Pronunciation
The Old National Pronunciation () was the system established for the phonology of standard Chinese as decided by the Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation from 1913 onwards, and published in the 1919 edition of the ''Guóyīn Zìdiǎn' ...
, as a mishmash of dialects, bookish, and reminiscent of previous dynasties. While drawing phonetic features from Beijing dialect, many phonological features of Southern Mandarin had been retained. In December 1921, Henri Picard-Destelan, codirector of the Post Office, quietly ordered a return to Nanking syllabary "until such time as uniformity is possible." Although the Soothill-Wade period was brief, it was a time when 13,000 offices were created, a rapid and unprecedented expansion. At the time the policy was reversed, one third of all postal establishments used Soothill-Wade spelling. The Ministry published a revised pronunciation standard based strictly on Northern Mandarin in 1932.
In 1943, the Japanese ousted A. M. Chapelain, the last French head of the Chinese post. The post office had been under French administration almost continuously since Piry's appointment as postal secretary in 1901.
In 1958, Communist China announced that it was adopting the
pinyin
Hanyu Pinyin (), often shortened to just pinyin, is the official romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese in China, and to some extent, in Singapore and Malaysia. It is often used to teach Mandarin, normally written in Chinese fo ...
romanization system. Implementing the new system was a gradual process. The government did not get around to abolishing postal romanization until 1964. Even then, the post office did not adopt pinyin, but merely withdrew Latin characters from official use, such as in postal cancellation markings.
Mapmakers of the time followed various approaches. Private atlas makers generally used postal romanization in the 1940s, but they later shifted to Wade-Giles. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency used a mix of postal romanization and Wade-Giles. The U.S. Army Map Service used Wade-Giles exclusively.
The U.S. government and the American press adopted pinyin in 1979. The
International Organization for Standardization
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO ) is an international standard development organization composed of representatives from the national standards organizations of member countries. Membership requirements are given in Ar ...
followed suit in 1982.
[ "ISO 7098:1982 – Documentation – Romanization of Chinese". Retrieved 2009-03-01.]
Postal romanization remained official in Taiwan until 2002, when
Tongyong Pinyin was adopted. In 2009,
Hanyu Pinyin
Hanyu Pinyin (), often shortened to just pinyin, is the official romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese in China, and to some extent, in Singapore and Malaysia. It is often used to teach Mandarin, normally written in Chinese for ...
replaced Tongyong Pinyin as the official romanization (see
Chinese language romanization in Taiwan
There are many romanization systems used in Taiwan (officially the Republic of China). The first Chinese language romanization system in Taiwan, Pe̍h-ōe-jī, was developed for Taiwanese by Presbyterian missionaries and promoted by the ind ...
). While street names in
Taipei
Taipei (), officially Taipei City, is the capital and a special municipality of the Republic of China (Taiwan). Located in Northern Taiwan, Taipei City is an enclave of the municipality of New Taipei City that sits about southwest of the ...
have been romanized via Hanyu Pinyin, municipalities throughout Taiwan, such as
Kaohsiung and
Tainan
Tainan (), officially Tainan City, is a special municipality in southern Taiwan facing the Taiwan Strait on its western coast. Tainan is the oldest city on the island and also commonly known as the "Capital City" for its over 200 years of hi ...
, presently use a number of romanizations, including Tongyong Pinyin and postal romanization.
See also
*
École française d'Extrême-Orient romanization method
*
Postage stamps and postal history of China
Notes
References
Citations
Bibliography
* ''China Postal Album: Showing the Postal Establishments and Postal Routes in Each Province.'' 1st ed. Shanghai: Directorate General of Posts, 1907.
* ''China Postal Album: Showing the Postal Establishments and Postal Routes in Each Province.'' 2nd ed. Peking: Directorate General of Posts, 1919.
* ''China Postal Atlas: Showing the Postal Establishments and Postal Routes in Each Province.'' 3rd ed. Nanking: Directorate General of Posts, 1933.
* ''China Postal Atlas: Showing the Postal Establishments and Postal Routes in Each Province.'' 4th ed. Nanking: Directorate General of Posts, 1936.
* Playfair, G. M. H. ''The Cities and Towns of China: A Geographical Dictionary.'' 2nd. ed. Shanghai: Kelly & Walsh Ltd., 1910.
* "Yóuzhèng shì pīnyīn" () ''Zhōngguó dà bǎikē quánshū: Yuyán wénzì'' (). Beijing: Zhōngguó dà bǎikē quánshū chūbǎnshè (), 1998.
{{Authority control
Philately of China
Postal system of China
Romanization of Chinese