WadeGiles

Wade-Giles is a system for romanizing Standard Mandarin and other Chinese varieties, developed in the 19th century by British sinologists Thomas Wade and Herbert Giles. It became the dominant romanization in the English-speaking world for scholarly and general publications for much of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The system shaped many widely used spellings, such as Peking for 北京, Nanking for 南京, and Chung-kuo for Zhongguo (China).

Features: Wade-Giles distinguishes aspirated and unaspirated consonants with apostrophes; it uses digraphs and several conventions that differ from Pinyin, such as ch for zh or j sounds and hs for certain sibilants. Tones were rendered either with diacritics on vowels or with numerical tone marks in later practice. It also employs hyphenation in syllables and sometimes places initial consonants with a trailing apostrophe, as in Ch'ang-an for Chang-an.

History and usage: The system was widely used in Western scholarship, dictionaries, and maps from the late 1800s into the mid-20th century. The People's Republic of China introduced Hanyu Pinyin in 1958 and gradually supplanted Wade-Giles in official use; Wade-Giles remains common in older texts and in some places, including historical maps and Taiwan-era publications.

Legacy: Wade-Giles illustrates the variety of approaches to transcribing Chinese phonology and remains a reference in the study of historical sources. It is frequently encountered in bibliographies and maps produced before the Pinyin standardization.