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48-460: Ruyuan ( postal : Yuyuan; Chinese : 乳源 ; pinyin : Rǔyuán ; Jyutping : jyu5 jyun4 jyun6 ), officially Ruyuan Yao Autonomous County , is a county of northern Guangdong province, China, with a small border with Hunan to the northwest. It is under the administration of Shaoguan City. This Guangdong location article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Postal romanization Postal romanization

96-427: A British colony, not a treaty port, was similar. Foreigners were welcomed and had stable safe bases, as did Christian missionaries. Outside the ports, the only foreigners were occasional Christian missionaries, and they often encountered serious difficulties. The other 89 cities that became treaty ports between 1842 and 1914 were of minor importance. The Shanghai International Settlement rapidly developed into one of

144-591: A consequence of Japan's rapid transition to a modern nation. Japan had sought treaty revision earnestly, and in 1894, signed a new treaty with Britain which revised or abrogated the previous "unequal" treaty. Other countries signed similar treaties. The new treaties came into force in July 1899. Following the Ganghwa Treaty of 1876, the Korean kingdom of Joseon agreed to the opening of three strategic ports and

192-543: A long-time customs manager, was appointed postal secretary in 1901. Appointing a French national to the top position fulfilled an 1898 commitment by China to "take into account the recommendations of the French government" when selecting staff for the post office. Until 1911, the post office remained part of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service , which meant that Hart was Piry's boss. To resolve

240-610: A number of romanizations, including Tongyong Pinyin and postal romanization. Treaty Ports The British established their first treaty ports in China after the First Opium War by the Treaty of Nanking in 1842. As well as ceding the island of Hong Kong to Great Britain in perpetuity, the treaty also established five treaty ports at Shanghai , Guangzhou (Canton), Ningbo , Fuzhou , and Xiamen (Amoy). The following year

288-608: A revolution against the Qing government . Aggressive Japanese moves to dominate China in World War I caused a strong backlash of nationalism in the May Fourth Movement , which focused its ire not just on Japan, but also on the entire port city system as emblematic of imperialism that should no longer be tolerated. The national government had almost no police power in the port cities, allowing secret societies to flourish in

336-714: A romanization system called the Nanking syllabary . The Imperial Maritime Customs Post Office would cancel postage with a stamp that gave the city of origin in Latin letters, often romanized using Giles's system. In 1896, the Customs Post was combined with other postal services and renamed the Chinese Imperial Post . As a national agency, the Imperial Post was an authority on Chinese place names. When

384-627: A true representation of the varieties of Chinese orthoepy as evinced by the Post Office's repeated desire to transcribe according to "local pronunciation" or "provincial sound-equivalents". At the Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation in 1913, the idea of a national language with a standardized trans-regional phonology was approved. A period of turmoil followed as President Yuan Shikai reversed course and attempted to restore

432-580: The Old Bund ), was the first in China, opening in 1844, 20 years before the Shanghai bund. A typical bund contained British, German, French, American, Japanese, and other nationals. The bund was a self-governing operation with its own shops, restaurants, recreational facilities, parks, churches, courts, police, and local government. The facilities were generally off-limits to the natives. The British, who by far dominated foreign trade with China, normally were

480-580: The Wade–Giles system became widespread, some argued that the post office should adopt it. This idea was rejected at a conference held in 1906 in Shanghai . Instead, the conference formally adopted Nanking syllabary. This decision allowed the post office to continue to use various romanizations that it had already selected. Wade–Giles romanization is based on the Beijing dialect , a pronunciation standard since

528-563: The foreign concessions in China , effectively removing them from the control of local governments. Western images of the Chinese treaty ports focus on the distinctive geography of the "bund", a long narrow strip of land in a prime location on the waterfront where the businesses, offices, warehouses, and residences of all foreigners were located. The Shanghai Bund was the largest and most famous. The North Riverbank in Ningbo (nowadays known as

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576-402: The 1850s. The use of Nanking syllabary did not suggest that the post office considered Nanjing pronunciation to be standard. Rather, it was an attempt to accommodate a variety of Mandarin pronunciations with a single romanization system. The spelling "Amoy" is based on pronunciation of Xiamen in the neighboring Zhangzhou dialect of Hokkien 廈門 ; Ēe-mûi , which historically contributed to

624-656: The American press adopted pinyin in 1979. The International Organization for Standardization followed suit in 1982. Postal romanization remained official in Taiwan until 2002, when Tongyong Pinyin was adopted. In 2009, Hanyu Pinyin replaced Tongyong Pinyin as the official romanization (see Chinese language romanization in Taiwan ). While street names in Taipei have been romanized via Hanyu Pinyin, municipalities throughout Taiwan, such as Kaohsiung and Tainan , presently use

672-726: The British, the Americans, and the French, continued to hold their concessions and extraterritorial jurisdictions until the Second World War . This ended when the Japanese stormed into their concessions in late 1941. They formally relinquished their treaty rights in a new "equal treaties" agreement with Chiang Kai-shek 's nationalist government-in-exile in Chongqing in 1943. The international communities that were residues of

720-464: The Chinese and British signed the Treaty of the Bogue , which added provisions for extraterritoriality and the most favored nation status for the latter country. Subsequent negotiations with the Americans (1844 Treaty of Wanghia ) and the French (1844 Treaty of Whampoa ) led to further concessions for these nations on the same terms as the British. The second group of treaty ports was set up following

768-608: The Chinese community, some of which turned into criminal gangs. Eventually, Shanghai had a strong underground illegal underworld that was ready to employ violence. In modern China, most of the country's special economic zones are located in former treaty ports and therefore have symbolic significance in demonstrating a "reversal of fortunes" in China's dealings with foreigners since the century of humiliation . Researcher Zongyuan Zoe Liu writes that "[t]he success of these cities as 'red' treaty ports represented another step in China's overall reform and opening-up plan while legitimizing

816-688: The First Opium War ended in 1842. The major powers involved were the British, the French, and the Americans, although by the end of the 19th century all the major powers were involved. The system effectively ended when Japan took control of most of the ports in the late 1930s, the Russians relinquished their treaty rights in the wake of the Russian Revolution in 1917, and the Germans were expelled in 1914. The three main treaty powers,

864-439: The Japanese ousted A. M. Chapelain, the last French head of the Chinese post. The post office had been under French administration almost continuously since Piry's appointment as postal secretary in 1901. In 1958, Communist China announced that it was adopting the pinyin romanization system. Implementing the new system was a gradual process. The government did not get around to abolishing postal romanization until 1964. Even then,

912-517: The Post Office, quietly ordered a return to Nanking syllabary "until such time as uniformity is possible." Although the Soothill-Wade period was brief, it was a time when 13,000 offices were created, a rapid and unprecedented expansion. At the time the policy was reversed, one third of all postal establishments used Soothill-Wade spelling. The Ministry published a revised pronunciation standard based strictly on Jilu Mandarin in 1932. In 1943,

960-560: The Treaty Ports were incorporated into the new service. The Customs Post was smaller than other postal services in China, such as the British. As the Imperial Post, it grew rapidly and soon became the dominant player in the market. In 1899, Hart, as inspector general of posts, asked postmasters to submit romanizations for their districts. Although Hart asked for transliterations "according to the local pronunciation", most postmasters were reluctant to play lexicographer and simply looked up

1008-575: The United States. In 1858, the Treaty of Amity and Commerce designated four more ports, Kanagawa , Hyogo , Nagasaki , and Niigata . The treaty with the United States was followed by similar ones with Britain, the Netherlands, Russia, and France. The ports permitted legal extraterritoriality for citizens of the treaty nations. The system of treaty ports ended in Japan in the year 1899 as

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1056-564: The Wade–Giles system to be specific to English. Atlases explaining postal romanization were issued in 1907, 1919, 1933, and 1936. The ambiguous result of the 1906 conference led critics to complain that postal romanization was idiosyncratic. According to modern scholar Lane J. Harris: What they have criticized is actually the very strength of postal romanization. That is, postal romanization accommodated local dialects and regional pronunciations by recognizing local identity and language as vital to

1104-457: The conversion of the Chinese population but discovered they became widely popular for setting up medical and educational facilities. For example, St John's University in Shanghai (1879–1952) first set up faculties of theology, Western learning, and Chinese languages, then expanded to cover literature, science, medicine, and intense coverage of Western languages eagerly sought by the ambitious Chinese intellectuals and entrepreneurs who had rejected

1152-501: The decision to use Nanking syllabary was not intended to suggest that the post office recognized any specific dialect as standard. The Lower Yangtze Mandarin dialect spoken in Nanjing makes more phonetic distinctions than other dialects. A romanization system geared to this dialect can be used to reflect pronunciation in a wider variety of dialects. Southern Mandarin is widely spoken in both Jiangsu and Anhui . In Giles' idealization,

1200-423: The dialects of various other cities, allowing the reader to create locally based transliteration. From January 1893 to September 1896, local postal services issued postage stamps that featured the romanized name of the city they served using local pronunciation. An imperial edict issued in 1896 designated the Customs Post a national postal service and renamed it the Chinese Imperial Post . The local post offices in

1248-485: The end of the Second Opium War (Arrow War) in 1860 and eventually, more than 80 treaty ports were established in China alone, involving many foreign powers. Foreigners all lived in prestigious sections newly built for them on the edges of existing port cities. They enjoyed legal extraterritoriality, as stipulated in the unequal treaties. Some of these port areas were directly leased by foreign powers such as in

1296-536: The formation of the local Amoy dialect of Hokkien in Xiamen . "Peking" is carried over from the d'Anville map which also came from older texts, such as Italian Jesuit Martino Martini 's De Bello Tartarico Historia (1654) and Novus Atlas Sinensis (1655). In Nanking syllabary, the city is Pehking . The irregular oo in "Soochow" is to distinguish this city from Xuzhou in northern Jiangsu. The other postal romanizations are based on "Southern Mandarin",

1344-560: The growing nation. Port cities combined several leadership roles. First of all, they were the major port of entry for all imports and exports - except for opium, which was handled by smugglers in other cities. Foreign entrepreneurs introduce the latest European manufacturing techniques, providing a model followed sooner or later by all of China. The first establishments focused on shipbuilding, ship repair, railway repair, and factories producing textiles, matches, porcelain, flour, and machinery. Tobacco, cigarettes, textiles, and food products were

1392-554: The historical court dialect based on the Nanjing dialect , which used to be the imperial lingua franca of the late Ming and early Qing court. Pinyin spellings are based on Standard Chinese , a form based on the Beijing dialect that is taught in the Chinese education system. After the Kuomintang (KMT) party came to power in 1927, the capital was moved from Peking ('northern capital') to Nanking ('southern capital'). Peking

1440-457: The largest presence. Businessmen and officials typically brought their own families with them and stayed for years but sent their older children back to England for education. Chinese sovereignty was only nominal. Officially, the foreign powers were not allowed to station military units in the bund, but in practice, there often was a warship or two in the harbor. The treaty port system in China lasted approximately one hundred years. It began when

1488-672: The leadership of the CPC over the Chinese state and people." For encyclopedic details on each treaty port, see Robert Nield's China's Foreign Places: The Foreign Presence in China in the Treaty Port Era, 1840-1943 (2015). In these territories the foreign powers obtained, under a lease treaty, not only the right to trade and exemptions for their subjects but a truly colonial control over each concession territory , de facto annexation: Japan opened two ports to foreign trade, Shimoda and Hakodate , in 1854 ( Convention of Kanagawa ), to

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1536-594: The old Confucian exam system for the Western model of modernity. Engineering schools were established as well, and by 1914 a network of universities, colleges, teacher training schools, and specialized industrial schools was headquartered in the Port cities, and diffusing their alumni across urban China. Students poured into the port cities. Many adopted ideas and used the facilities newly opened to them to network with each other, set up organizations and publications, and plot

1584-456: The port cities, with printing shops, newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets in Chinese and European languages. Book publishers often featured Chinese translations of European classics in philosophy, politics, literature, and social issues. According to historian Klaus Mühlhahn: Christian missionaries saw all of the Chinese population as their target audience, but they were headquartered in the port cities. The missionaries had very modest success in

1632-466: The post office did not adopt pinyin, but merely withdrew Latin characters from official use, such as in postal cancellation markings. Mapmakers of the time followed various approaches. Private atlas makers generally used postal romanization in the 1940s, but they later shifted to Wade–Giles. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency used a mix of postal romanization and Wade–Giles. The U.S. Army Map Service used Wade–Giles exclusively. The U.S. government and

1680-726: The relevant characters in a dictionary. The spellings that they submitted generally followed the Wade–Giles system, which was the standard method of transliteration at this time. The post office published a draft romanization map in 1903. Disappointed with the Wade-based map, Hart issued another directive in 1905. This one told postmasters to submit romanizations "not as directed by Wade, but according to accepted or usual local spellings." Local missionaries could be consulted, Hart suggested. However, Wade's system did reflect pronunciation in Mandarin-speaking areas. Théophile Piry,

1728-425: The romanization issue, Piry organized an Imperial Postal Joint-Session Conference in Shanghai in the spring of 1906. This was a joint postal and telegraphic conference. The conference resolved that existing spellings would be retained for names already transliterated. Accents, apostrophes, and hyphens would be dropped to facilitate telegraphic transmission. The requirement for addresses to be given in Chinese characters

1776-528: The speaker consistently makes various phonetic distinctions not made in Beijing dialect (or in the dialect of any other specific city). Giles created the system to encompass a range of dialects. For the French-led post office, an additional advantage of the system was that it allowed "the romanization of non-English speaking people to be met as far as possible," as Piry put it. That is to say, Piry considered

1824-571: The specialty in Canton. Financing was handled by branch banks, as well as entirely new operations such as HSBC -the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, which remains a world-class establishment into the 21st century. Across the modernizing world, railway construction was a major financial and industrial endeavor, usually led by the British. Investments now poured into building a railway-plus-telegraph system knitting China together, connecting

1872-483: The teaching of Literary Chinese . Yuan died in 1916 and the Ministry of Education published a pronunciation standard now known as Old National Pronunciation for Guoyu in 1918. The post office reverted to Wade's system in 1920 and 1921. It was the era of the May Fourth Movement , when language reform was the rage. The post office adopted a dictionary by William Edward Soothill as a reference. The Soothill-Wade system

1920-422: The treaty port era ended in the late 1940s when the communists took over and nearly all foreigners left. Although the great majority of Chinese lived in traditional rural areas, a handful of booming treaty port cities became vibrant centers that had an enormous long-term impact on the Chinese economy and society. Above all Shanghai became the dominant urban center. Tianjin and Shenyang followed; Hong Kong, although

1968-594: The treaty ports, and other major cities, as well as mining districts and agricultural centers. Chinese entrepreneurs learned their skills in the port cities, and soon applied for and received bank loans for their startups. Chinese merchants headquartered there set up branches across Southeast Asia, including British Singapore and Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, French Indochina, and the American Philippines. The information industry flourished in

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2016-503: The world's most modern cities, often compared to Paris, Berlin, and London. It set the standard of modernity for China and all of East Asia. In Shanghai, the British and American settlements combined in 1863 into an international settlement, with the French settlement operated separately nearby. The foreigners took out long-term leases on the land and set up factories, offices, warehouses, sanitation, police, gardens, restaurants, hotels, banks, and private clubs. The Shanghai Municipal Council

2064-420: Was a system of transliterating place names in China developed by postal authorities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For many cities, the corresponding postal romanization was the most common English-language form of the city's name from the 1890s until the 1980s, when postal romanization was replaced by pinyin , but the system remained in place on Taiwan until 2002. In 1892, Herbert Giles created

2112-581: Was created in 1854, with nine members who were elected by three dozen foreign landowners at first, and by about 2,000 electors in the 1920s. Chinese residents comprised 90% of the total population of Shanghai but complained about taxation without representation. Eventually, the Council admitted five Chinese representatives. The European community promoted technological and economic innovation, as well as knowledge industries, that proved especially attractive to Chinese entrepreneurs as models for their cities across

2160-484: Was dropped. For new transliterations, local pronunciation would be followed in Guangdong as well as in parts of Guangxi and Fujian . In other areas, a system called Nanking syllabary would be used. Nanking syllabary is one of several transliteration systems presented by Giles to represent various local dialects. Nanjing had once been the capital and its dialect was, like that of Beijing, a pronunciation standard. But

2208-423: Was marked with a romanized form of the city's name. In addition, there were companies that provided local postal service in each of these cities. A Chinese-English Dictionary by Herbert Giles, published in 1892, popularized the Wade–Giles method of transliteration. This system had been created by Thomas Francis Wade in 1867. It is based on pronunciation in Beijing. Giles's dictionary also gives pronunciation in

2256-601: Was renamed to "Peiping" ('northern peace'). The Customs Post, China's first government-run post office, opened to the public and began issuing postage stamps in 1878. This office was part of the Imperial Maritime Customs Service , led by Irishman Robert Hart . By 1882, the Customs Post had offices in twelve Treaty Ports : Shanghai , Amoy , Chefoo , Chinkiang , Chungking , Foochow , Hankow , Ichang , Kewkiang , Nanking , Weihaiwei , and Wuhu . Local offices had postmarking equipment so mail

2304-428: Was used for newly created offices. Existing post offices retained their romanizations. Critics described the Ministry's standard, now called Old National Pronunciation , as a mishmash of dialects, bookish, and reminiscent of previous dynasties. While drawing phonetic features from Beijing dialect, many phonological features of Southern Mandarin had been retained. In December 1921, Henri Picard-Destelan , co-director of

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