Wade-Giles and pinyin: convert both ways

Peking, Tsingtao, Taipei: where the old spellings come from

Before pinyin, Chinese places reached English in older spellings. Peking, Canton and Tsingtao are postal spellings, fixed by the Chinese post office early in the twentieth century; the beer still carries the postal name of Qingdao. Taipei and Kaohsiung are Wade-Giles with the apostrophes and hyphens left out: T'ai-pei and Kao-hsiung.

Wade-Giles was the usual spelling of Mandarin in English books, maps and documents until pinyin replaced it. That is why older books write Mao Tse-tung and the Kuomintang, while today's news writes Mao Zedong and Guomindang.

Wade-Giles: the spelling of the old books

Wade-Giles was developed by the British diplomat Thomas Wade in the mid-nineteenth century and completed by Herbert Giles in his Chinese-English dictionary of 1892. It was the usual way to write Mandarin in English until pinyin replaced it from the late 1970s, and it is still found in older books, maps, library records and many names.

The apostrophe carries meaning: it marks an aspirated sound, said with a puff of air. Wade-Giles p, t, k, ch and ts are pinyin b, d, g, j or zh, and z; p', t', k', ch' and ts' are pinyin p, t, k, q or ch, and c. So Ch'ing is qing while Ching is jing. When the apostrophes are dropped, as on signs and in passports, the difference is lost, which is why the tool shows both readings.

Wade-Giles writes hs for pinyin x (Hsi-an is Xi'an), j for r (jên is rén), and adds -ih or -ŭ to some syllables (chih is zhi, tzŭ is zi). Tones are small raised numbers after the syllable: ch'ing¹. Pinyin writes the same tones as marks over the vowel.

Wade-Giles and pinyin compared

The main differences, letter by letter. The left column is pinyin, the middle one Wade-Giles.

Hanyu Pinyin: the standard since 1958

Hanyu Pinyin was adopted in the People's Republic of China in 1958 and became the international standard ISO 7098 in 1982. Libraries, atlases and the press outside China moved to it in the decades after; the Library of Congress converted its catalogue in 2000.

Pinyin writes the tones as marks over the vowels (qīng, dǎo) and needs an apostrophe only where a syllable that starts with a, o or e could be read with the one before: Xi'an is two syllables, xian one. Every Mandarin syllable, with audio, is in the pinyin chart

Taiwan: Tongyong, MPS II and the passport

Taiwan used Wade-Giles for most of the twentieth century and published MPS II (Mandarin Phonetic Symbols II) in 1986. Tongyong Pinyin, made for the Taipei city government in 1998, was the national standard from 2002 and also tries to fit Taiwanese Hokkien and Hakka. Hanyu Pinyin has been the standard since 2009, but street signs and personal names still show all of these.

For a first passport, the Bureau of Consular Affairs of Taiwan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs has its own name tool. It gives the name in Wade-Giles, MPS II, Tongyong Pinyin and Hanyu Pinyin and writes it family name first with a comma after it and a hyphen between the syllables of the given name, which the applicant may leave out: CHEN, YI-LING. Someone who already had a passport keeps its spelling, and a family name should be spelled like that of relatives.

The bureau also accepts a spelling from the reading in Taiwanese Hokkien, Hakka or an indigenous language; this tool covers Mandarin only. The passport lines above follow the bureau's spelling table, but the bureau decides, so check the result with its tool: Name translation tool of the Bureau of Consular Affairs (in Chinese)

MPS II and Tongyong are built on the sounds of zhuyin, the phonetic symbols Taiwan's schools teach. How zhuyin and pinyin compare is explained on the page pinyin and zhuyin

Famous names in every system

Peking, Tsingtao and Canton are postal spellings. Chiang Kai-shek and Sun Yat-sen are not Mandarin at all: they follow the Cantonese reading of 蒋介石 and 孙逸仙, so no Mandarin system gives them.

For the pinyin of a name with the readings family names take, such as 曾 Zēng and 解 Xiè, and a mainland passport line, use the Chinese name to pinyin tool

Palladius: Chinese in Cyrillic

Russian has its own system, named after the monk Palladius (Kafarov), whose Chinese-Russian dictionary appeared in the late nineteenth century. Russian writes Mao Zedong as Мао Цзэдун and Qingdao as Циндао. A few names keep an older form: Beijing is Пекин in Russian, where the system would give Бэйцзин.

Palladius writes the syllables of a word together and puts a hard sign where a syllable ending in -н meets a vowel: Chang'an is Чанъань. The tool reads Cyrillic in this system as well, so Мао Цзэдун can be typed in.

What the tool does not cover

Cantonese, Hokkien, Teochew and Hakka have their own sounds and spellings. Hong Kong names such as Chan and Wong are spelled from Cantonese, and Tan, Lim and Ng in Singapore and Malaysia from Hokkien or Teochew. The tool converts Mandarin only: typed as pinyin, Tan is read as the Mandarin syllable tan, which is not the name 陈.

Postal spellings such as Peking, Canton and Amoy, and readings of Chinese characters in other languages, do not follow a table of syllables, so the page names them but the tool does not convert them.

Names and signs you cannot copy

This tool needs text that you can type or paste. For a name on a business card, a street sign or a page of an old book, HanCam reads the characters with the camera of your iPhone or iPad and shows them with pinyin and tone marks, and the meaning. Copy the characters into the box on this page for the other spellings.

Questions and answers