Why Taiwan still writes Kaohsiung while mainland China switched to Pinyin
For most of the 20th century, English readers met Chinese names through Wade–Giles, the system behind spellings like Kaohsiung and Chiang Ching-kuo. Mainland China adopted Pinyin in 1958, but in Taiwan most people still romanise their legal names the older way, apostrophes and all.
The system grew out of the work of Thomas Francis Wade, a British diplomat in China who became Cambridge's first professor of Chinese. In 1867 he published the first English-language textbook of Beijing Mandarin, and in 1892 the diplomat Herbert Giles, helped by his son Lionel, a British Museum curator, polished the scheme in A Chinese–English Dictionary. Before that, romanisations usually followed the Nanjing dialect, prestigious since the early 1600s. Wade–Giles was built for specialists, and it shows.
Its signature is a small mark resembling an apostrophe that separates pairs such as p and pʻ, or k and kʻ. Wade borrowed the rough-breathing sign from Ancient Greek; Giles used an opening quotation mark; others made do with an ordinary apostrophe. Casual users often dropped the mark, not realising it carried meaning, so four different Mandarin sounds, written j, q, zh and ch in Pinyin, collapsed into a single ch in many familiar names. Pinyin solved this by reusing letters like b, d, g and j, which Mandarin does not otherwise need for voiced sounds. Wade–Giles also marks tones with superscript numbers from 1 to 4.
Its decline was gradual. British library catalogues moved to Pinyin in 1966, most countries had accepted it by 1979, and the International Organization for Standardization followed in 1982. Scholarly books kept the old spellings for years, and the Cambridge History of China still used Wade–Giles in 2016 to match its earlier volumes. In the West it also faced competition from Yale romanisation between the Second World War and the late 1970s.
Taiwan's path was more tangled. Wade–Giles served as the unofficial standard for decades alongside a series of official alternatives introduced in 1928, 1986 and 2000. Pinyin became official in 2009, and street signs in some cities were changed, yet everyday spellings of place and personal names there still largely follow the older system.
Source: Wade–Giles
