This Guide provides some technical orientation on using the Chinese language for all students in the course, particularly those with no prior background in Chinese studies.  Treat this Guide as a reference work for help in dealing with Chinese names and dates and general problems of transliteration.  Since the course is intended as a basic introduction to Chinese history, no previous knowledge about China is expected or presumed.

• Language
• Transliteration Systems
• Names
• Dates

In using the generic term "Chinese," we are referring to the language common to the northern part of the country and which has been adopted as a national standard by the government[s] of China (even though Cantonese, Fukienese, etc., have equal claim to be called "Chinese").  This language is often called in the West "Mandarin Chinese" (i.e., the language of the bureaucracy), a reasonable translation for the imperial-period term guanhua 官話.  Today it is known as the "national language" (kuo-yü 國語 ) on Taiwan and "common speech" (putonghua 普通話 ) on the Mainland.

In dealing with Chinese, you will have to face two areas of difficulty:

• A spoken language totally unrelated to most of those you may have studied so far, so you won't even find the familiarity of cognate vocabulary items.  The language has several distinctive features:
• It is completely uninflected; that means you don't have to worry about number, gender, tense, declension of nouns, or conjugation of verbs.
• Syllables are formed very simply.  In its most basic form, a syllable consists of a single vowel or diphthong, which may be preceded by a single consonant and may be followed by an 'n' or 'ng.'  There are no consonant clusters in Chinese.
• This means that Chinese has a relatively small number of possible syllables, so to distinguish among otherwise homonymous words, Chinese uses four different vowel tones.
• Some phonemes in Chinese are different from those in English.  In particular, Chinese distinguishes between aspirated and unaspirated consonants, whereas English differentiates between voiced and unvoiced consonants.
• A written language that uses a non-phonetic character script (with each character acting as a "logograph," or representation of a word), rather than an alphabetic phonetic script.  That is to say, each written Chinese character represents a word, but does not directly indicate the pronunciation of that word.  This means that the Chinese written language has proven extremely useful as a unifying device over time, as the spoken language has evolved, and over space, in a country where many different (and often mutually unintelligible) languages are spoken.  Each person in Chinese pronounces the characters according to his or her own language or dialect but still receives the same meaning from the character's visual form, the same way that the statement "(3x6) + 5 = 23" is understandable to anyone on sight but would be read out loud differently in Paris, Riyadh, Carácas, or Новосибирск.

At present, there are two major (and several minor) systems used in the English-speaking world for transliterating Chinese into our Latin alphabet.⁽¹⁾

• Wade-Giles, named after its 19th-century British designers and used in virtually all scholarly writing up until about a decade ago.  It represents the different tones by using numeral superscripts and indicates the aspirated consonants through the use of an apostrophe.  Many of your readings for this term use the Wade-Giles system.

• Pinyin 拼音 , or "spelling of sounds," a system developed in the People's Republic in accordance with state directives on language reform.  Pinyin is the "official" system of the PRC, and therefore ever since the U.S. established formal diplomatic relations with the PRC in 1979 this system has also been adopted by offices of the U.S. government⁽²⁾, by most newspapers and magazines, and, increasingly, by many scholars.  The Pinyin system represents the different tones through accent marks over the vowels.

Also, there are two other systems with which you may come in contact:
 

• Yale, which is used occasionally in journals and language texts.  This is the system which leads the native speaker of English most closely to accurate Chinese pronunciation; unfortunately, it simply has not gained wide popularity.  It too uses accent marks to indicate tones.

• GR, or Gwoyeu Romatzyh 國語羅馬字 ("national language romanization"), developed by Y. R. Chao  [Zhao Yuanren 趙元任,1892-1982], in which differences in tone are indicated through spelling changes.  This system was used for a while at Harvard (where Chao's daughter taught for years) and in several reference works and esoteric journals. Lin Yutang 林語堂 , in his Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage, uses a system based on similar principles.

• Linguists in France, Germany, Russia, etc., all have developed systems of transliteration appropriate to their own language.

• Many 19th and early 20th century works transcribe Chinese words according to the pronunciation prevalent where their authors lived and worked.  Such "systems" are often completely idiosyncratic, although there are now standard methods for transliterating Cantonese and other southern languages.

• Every Chinese is granted the courtesy of writing his or her name with whatever Latin letters he or she chooses. 

What are you to make of all this complexity?  For this course, I ask merely that you:
 

1. be aware that all these different systems exist, but forget about all of them except for both Wade-Giles and Pinyin;
 
2. bear in mind that these systems are merely different conventions for representing the same thing; e.g., that the 20th-century author 魯迅 Lu Hsün [WG] is really the same person as Lu Xun [PY];
 
3. choose either of these systems for your own writing and be consistent in using it; and
 
4. be sensitive to the fact that in China there is a political dimension even to language.  Since the Pinyin system is the creation of the People's Republic, it is not generally used (but is now at least acceptable) on Taiwan, where the governing authorities prefer to keep the more "traditional" Wade-Giles system.

All of the transliteration problems mentioned above apply in the naming of places, with the additional factor that in the 19th century the Imperial Maritime Customs, which also handled postal functions, published a Gazetteer which "standardized" the spelling of place-names, usually according to local pronunciations.  Thus, the standard spelling of city-names like Kowloon [ / Jiulong / Chiu-lung / 九龍 ], Canton [Guangzhou / Kuang-chou / 廣州 ], Kiukiang [Jiujiang / Chiu-chiang / 九江], and Wusih [Wuxi / Wu-hsi / 無錫 ] reflects the pronunciation a regional dialect ("topolect") rather than a uniform transliteration system.

There are also cases where the Chinese name of a city itself represents an attempt to transcribe a name from one of the "minority" languages (e.g., " Wulumuqi / Wu-lu-mu-ch'i / 烏魯木齊" for Urumchi).

Names of persons:

Reflecting the traditional importance of the family unit over its individual members, one's family name is always written first in China, followed by one's personal name.⁽³⁾ Usually, family names, or 姓 xing have only one character, while personal names, or 名字mingzi have two.

Of course, there are exceptions.  Some family names are written with two-character compounds.  In such cases, the individual usually has a single character for a personal name, so as not to depart from the standard three-character total.  Examples would be the renowned historians司馬遷 Sima Qian and 歐陽修 Ouyang Xiu.  However, even without a compound family name, some individuals have only single-character personal names, such as the 20th-century scholar 胡适 Hu Shih.

Persons not belonging to the Han ethnic majority (e.g., Mongols, Manchus, etc.) are generally referred to only by a polysyllabic personal name.  Here, you have the option of transliterating either the original pronunciation or the Chinese transcription of it.

Certain conventions have been adopted regarding the punctuation of names. In Wade-Giles, components of compounds are separated by a hyphen and only the first word is capitalized, while in Pinyin, components are joined together.  Compare the versions of four names in the following table:
 

Names of emperors (as opposed to mere "persons"...)

To illustrate the principles involved here, let us take up the case of the man who founded the Ming dynasty in 1368:

1. As an individual, he was a man of the Zhu family named Yuanzhang, so according to the usual manner he would be called 朱元璋 Zhu Yuanzhang.
 
2. However, once he ascended the throne, his personal name became taboo; thenceforth, he would be referred to by his dynastic or "temple" name, or 廟號 miao hao: Great Ancestor of the Ming, or 明太祖 Ming Taizu.  According to the conventions of English usage, we would refer to him as "Emperor Taizu."
 
3. In addition, his reign-period was given a felicitous appellation or "year name," or 年號 nian hao.  In this case, to celebrate the victory over the Mongols, his reign was known as the period of "overwhelming military prowess," or Hongwu.  Again according to the conventions of English usage, we refer to the individual who ruled during this period as "The Hongwu Emperor."⁽⁴⁾

Getting a clear understanding of dates in Chinese history can be particularly tricky for two reasons:
 

• Up until 1912, China used a lunar-based calendar, which had twelve months of thirty days each.  To bring this system into line with the earth's rotation (and thus with the cycle of seasons), "intercalary" months were inserted, seven times every nineteen years, to make sure that the solstices and equinoxes came in the same month each year.
• Also, since the New Year marked the advent of Spring, it began later than the Western solar calendar.  This meant that the 12th month of the year which for the most part corresponded to, say, 1857, would actually come in January 1858.  Fortunately, scholars have put together concordances for correlating lunar and solar dates; even more fortunately, only graduate students are expected to be able to use such concordances, some of which are listed on your syllabus.

The Chinese did not date years from any single starting point;⁽⁵⁾ instead, the convention was to give the number since the start of the current year-name, or nian hao.  For example, Qianlong 41/5/19 would indicate the 19th day of the 5th lunar month of the 41st year of the Qianlong Emperor's reign  in the middle of the Qing dynasty (corresponding to 4 July 1776).

During the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368/1644/1911), each emperor kept the same nian hao throughout his entire reign, for which later historians are deeply grateful.  However, in earlier dynasties, nian hao were frequently changed during a single emperor's reign.

The traditional system is still reflected on Taiwan, where each year is known officially as the n^th year of the Republic (counting from the 1911 revolution), so add [19]11 to 民國 Min-kuo dates to get the Western equivalent. Months and days, however, follow the Western solar format.

Since its founding in 1949, the People's Republic has used the Western method of counting years, overlooking the system's Western and Christian origins in favor of its international applicability.  However, the PRC's use of  公元 gongyuan ("common era") and 公元前 gongyuanqian ("before the common era") corresponds to the "CE" and "BCE" which are coming to replace "AD" and "BC" in the West.

1. Compare the following examples for transliterating the sentence: "Do you plan to live in Shanghai? 你想住 在上海嗎" 

W-G: Ni³ hsiang³ chu⁴ tsai⁴ Shang⁴ Hai³ ma
PY: Nǐ xiǎng zhù zài Shànghǎi ma
Yale: Nǐ syǎng jù dzài Shànghǎi ma
GR: Nii sheang juh tzay Shanqhae .ma

3. Under these circumstances, it only generates more confusion to use the English terms of "last" and "first" names.

4. If we were to use this system in the United, the parallel usages would be: "President Franklin Roosevelt," but "The 'New Deal' President;" or "President Lyndon Johnson," but "The 'Great Society' President."

5. Unlike the Christian system of dating years from the birth of Christ, or the Moslem system of counting from the Hegira.