Wade–Giles

Wade–Giles is a romanization system for the Mandarin Chinese language and the second most common transcription after Pinyin. Based on the Beijing dialect, Wade–Giles was developed from a system produced by Thomas Francis Wade during the mid-19th century, and was given completed form with Herbert Giles's A Chinese–English Dictionary (1892). It became the system of transcription familiar in the English-speaking world for most of the 20th century. It still sees majority usage for names in Taiwan, and has retained a "significant role" in international sinology.

In mainland China, Wade–Giles has been mostly replaced by Hanyu Pinyin, which was officially adopted in 1958, with exceptions for the romanized forms of some of the most commonly used names of locations and persons and other proper nouns. In Taiwan, however, the romanized name for most locations, persons and other proper nouns is still based on the Wade–Giles derived romanized form, for example Kaohsiung, the Matsu Islands and Chiang Ching-kuo.

British library cataloguings adopted Pinyin in 1966, and Wade–Giles began to decline in the 1970s with the gradual acceptance of Pinyin by most nations by 1979 and by the ISO in 1982. It saw continued English publication as late as A.C. Graham's Disputers of the Tao (1989) and Livia Kohn's Lao-tzu and the Tao-te-Ching (1998), and in re-publications such as of Feng Youlan. The Cambridge History of China (2016) continues to use Wade–Giles in conformity with earlier editions.

History

Before the late 19th century, romanization was commonly based on the Nanjing dialect, as a prestigious form of speech at the time dating back to the early 1600s.