In the early 20th century twentieth century, China (starting with the dying Qing Empire) used Postal (Office) System Pinyin (Traditional Chinese:郵政式拼音 Pinyin: Yóuzhèngshì Pīnyīn) (unrelated to the modern Hanyu Pinyin), based on Wade-Giles (in particularly, Herbert Giles's A Chinese-English Dictionary) for postal purposes, especially for placenames on letters and stamps; it was not for universal usage. It uses some already common European names of Chinese places that override the Wade-Giles system, and incorporate some dialectal pronunciations.

The postal system was decided after the Imperial Postal Joint-Session Conference (帝國郵電聯席會議) in spring 1906 in Shanghai.

Main differences with Wade-Giles include:

• Complete lack of diacritic and accent marks.
• Chi, ch'i, and hsi (pinyin ji, qi, and xi) are represented as either tsi, tsi, and si or ki, ki, and hi depending on historic pronunciation, e.g.,
  • Peking (Pei-ching, Beijing)
  • Tientsin (T'ien-chin, Tianjin)
  • Tsinan (Chi-nan, Ji'nan)
• Unless it is the sole vowel in the syllable, the Wade-Giles u become w, e.g.,
  • Ankwo (An-kuo, Anguo)
  • Chinchow (Chin-chou, Jinzhou)
• Guangdong, Guangxi, and Fujian placenames are to be Romanized from the local dialects, such as Hakka, Cantonese, and Min (systems also obtained from Giles' A Chinese-English Dictionary).
  • Amoy (Hsia-men, Xiamen)
  • Swatow (Shan-t'ou, Shantou)
  • Quemoy (Chin-men, Jinmen)
• Popular pre-existing (from 19th century of earlier) European names for place in China are to be retained, such as those of the treaty ports.
  • Canton (Kuang-chou, Guangzhou)

See also: Romanization

Chinese language romanization | Postal system

Transcripción del sistema postal chino