Chinese postal romanization

The Chinese postal transcription system (Chinese 郵政式拼音 / 邮政式拼音, pinyin Yóuzhèngshì Pīnyīn, W.-.G. Yu2-cheng4-shih4 P'in1-yin1) was the transcription system for Chinese place names that came into use in the late Qing dynasty and was officially adopted by the Imperial Joint Postal Conference (帝國郵電聯席會議 / 帝国邮电联席会议, Dìguó Yóudiàn Liánxí Huìyì), held in Shanghai in the spring of 1906, was sanctioned. This transcription system was retained after the fall of the Qing dynasty (1912), and since it has been in use in the official postal atlas of the Republic of China ever since, it remained the usual way of transcribing Chinese place names in the West by cartographers well into the 20th century.

After the founding of the People's Republic of China, its replacement by the Republic of China at the United Nations in 1972, and the use of pinyin as the international standard in 1982 by ISO, the Chinese postal transcription system was partially replaced by pinyin for Han Chinese place names and SASM/GNC transcription for place names of ethnic minority languages, which is now accepted almost worldwide.

The system built on Wade-Giles for use in the postal service, especially for place names in the official postal atlas, letters, and stamps. It uses some common European names of Chinese places at the time, which took precedence over the Wade-Giles spelling, and includes some dialectal and historical pronunciations.

Key differences from Wade-Giles include:

• Complete lack of diacritical and stress marks (accents/sound marks).
• Chi, ch'i, and hsi (pinyin ji, qi, and xi) are represented either by tsi, tsi, and si or by ki, ki, and hi, depending on the historical pronunciation, for example:

• Changkiang (Ch'ang-chiang, Changjiang)
• Chungking (Ch'ung-ch'ing, Chongqing)
• Beijing (Pei-ching, Beijing)
• Shansi (Shan-hsi, Shanxi)
• Tientsin (T'ien-chin, Tianjin)
• Tsinan (Chi-nan, Jinan)

• the Wade-Giles u becomes w unless it is the only vowel, for example:

• Ankwo (An-kuo, Anguo)
• Kinchow / Chinchow (Chin-chou, Jinzhou)
• Soochow (Su-chou, Suzhou)

• Place names from the Guangdong, Guangxi and Fujian areas are transcribed from the local dialects, e.g. Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese (transcription systems also taken from Giles' A Chinese-English Dictionary).

• Amoy (Hsia-mên, Xiamen)
• Changchew (Chang-chou, Zhangzhou)
• Chinchew (Ch'üan-chou, Quanzhou)
• Quemoy (Chin-mên, Jinmen, Kinmen)
• Swatow (Shan-t'ou, Shantou)
• Teochew (Ch'ao-chou, Chaozhou)

• Widely used pre-existing (from the 19th century or earlier) European names for places in China are retained, such as the names of treaty ports, for example:

• Canton (Kuang-chou, Guangzhou)

Other orthographic peculiarities include:

See also

• Postal history and stamps of China
• Postal history and stamps of the treaty ports
• List of transcription systems for the Chinese languages