Communication and Consistency: The Romanisation of Mandarin By Archie Jacob Note from the author: In respect of brevity, the article will only consider a relatively short period and will exclusively refer to the history of romanisation of the language known as Mandarin, and to its history in the mainland area of China, and in the context of the Anglosphere. There are multiple languages and dialects spoken in China, and in Overseas Chinese communities. There is great variation in accents and dialects being present even within the Mandarin language. In some forms of Mandarin used out of the mainland area of China, the use of traditional characters continues, with other languages being spoken by minority groups or those from non-Mandarin speaking areas. This note is to clarify that the aim of the article is to provide a short history on the changing spellings of romanisations of Mandarin as it is spoken on the mainland of China, and mainly concerns the sources of change in Western spellings of respective Mandarin words. This article will refer to Mandarin, the most widely spoken language of the mainland, as Chinese. Minority languages and the Mandarin spoken by Overseas Chinese peoples have distinct histories which are deserving of their own approaches and histories. One should also consider the comparatively fewer Chinese surnames, and the fact that they are listed before the given name in the Chinese naming tradition. In keeping with the famous example used throughout this article, the surname/family name of Mao Zedong is Mao, with his given name being Zedong. In contrast to most names in the Anglosphere, the distinguishing aspect of Chinese names is the given name, rather than the family name. Italicised words are the pinyin translation of Chinese characters, or names of works in either language.
When studying the history of China, we historians often encounter a strange lack of continuity in the names ascribed to figures, places, and events. Why do some sources and writings refer to the first leader of the People’s Republic of China as Mao Zedong, and why do others write Mao Tse-tung? In Western writings, the shift from Mao Tse-tung to Mao Zedong occurs towards the end of the twentieth century. Names of people were not the only ways in which the writing of Mandarin from the mainland had changed: Peking is now called Beijing, Chunking is now Chongqing. But why are there so many different spellings?
Though Jesuit missionaries and Chinese scholars alike had developed very early attempts, the bestknown conversions of Chinese characters (hanzi) into roman script employed the system known as WadeGiles. This system was developed in the middle of the nineteenth century and was completed by 1892 with the Chinese-English Dictionary. This dictionary was published by Herbert Giles following on the earlier work of Thomas Wade. It is from this system, best known to previous generations of historians, that translations such as Mao Tse-Tung and NanChing have been derived. Wade had worked on a number of books that laid the foundation for what became the Wade-Giles system of romanisation, which was used for the majority of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many famous figures, place names and events, are still romanised using this system in keeping with contemporary practice, or to preserve continuity and recognition. Mao’s premier is sometimes still referred to as Chou En-lai (as he was by contemporaneous Western press), despite modern romanisation under pinyin using the spelling Zhou Enlai. The use of Wade-Giles, if in modern writings, is usually in well-known or exceptional cases. This discrepancy is still seen in the West in spellings of surnames of Chinese origin: two individuals may have their surname spelt in different ways despite their Chinese names using the same character, in this example 周. The Wade-Giles system was also employed in a similar time period to, and influenced the development of, postal romanisation of Chinese area names. English spellings of Chinese city names were issued by the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs Service (Da Qing huangjia haiguan zhongshuiwusi). This office, though run by the government of China, was staffed by foreigners from many nations. Before 1897, letters written had used various systems or ‘unofficial’ variations of Chinese place names, often leading to failure to deliver. However, the resultant names issued by the office after ‘standardisation’ have become well known, with such famous examples as Peking (Beijing), Kwantung (Guangdong), and Nanking (Nanjing). Many of these names did not quite obey the rules of Wade-Giles romanisation, which is why the system of postal romanisation is considered distinct. One might still hear these names used, for example with Canton (Guangzhou, or sometimes the province of Guangdong). Given its status as a national institution and the requirement
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