Chinese postal romanization

The Imperial Maritime Customs Post Office would cancel postage with a stamp that gave the city of origin in Latin letters, often romanized using Giles's system.

"Peking" is carried over from the d'Anville map which also came from older texts, such as Italian Jesuit Martino Martini's De Bello Tartarico Historia (1654) and Novus Atlas Sinensis (1655).

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, Amoy, Chefoo, Chinkiang, Chungking, Foochow, Hankow, Ichang, Kewkiang, Nanking, Weihaiwei, and Wuhu.

Local offices had postmarking equipment so mail was marked with a romanized form of the city's name.

Giles's dictionary also gives pronunciation in the dialects of various other cities, allowing the reader to create locally based transliteration.

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.

This one told postmasters to submit romanizations "not as directed by Wade, but according to accepted or usual local spellings."

Until 1911, the post office remained part of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, which meant that Hart was Piry's boss.

[13] To resolve the romanization issue, Piry organized an Imperial Postal Joint-Session Conference[d] in Shanghai in the spring of 1906.

But the decision to use Nanking syllabary was not intended to suggest that the post office recognized any specific dialect as standard.

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.

The ambiguous result of the 1906 conference led critics to complain that postal romanization was idiosyncratic.

[14] At the Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation in 1913, the idea of a national language with a standardized trans-regional phonology was approved.

[15] A period of turmoil followed as President Yuan Shikai reversed course and attempted to restore the teaching of Literary Chinese.

Critics described the Ministry's standard, now called Old National Pronunciation, as a mishmash of dialects, bookish, and reminiscent of previous dynasties.

In December 1921, Henri Picard-Destelan, co-director of the Post Office, quietly ordered a return to Nanking syllabary "until such time as uniformity is possible."

[18] Even then, the post office did not adopt pinyin, but merely withdrew Latin characters from official use, such as in postal cancellation markings.