Chinese postal romanization

Postal romanization was a system of transliterating Chinese place names developed by the Imperial Post Office in the early 1900s. The system was in common use until the 1980s.

For major cities and other places that already had widely accepted European names, traditional spellings were retained. With regard to other place names, the post office revised policy several times. Spellings given could reflect local pronunciation, Nanjing pronunciation, or Beijing pronunciation. Although pronunciation-based arguments were made for each of these options, using postal romanization to determine any form of Chinese pronunciation was limited by the fact that the system dropped out all dashes, diacritics, and apostrophes to facilitate telegraphic transmission.