Pinyin vs Wade–Giles: how Chinese is romanized

October 9, 2026 · 7 min read

Romanization is writing the sounds of Chinese in Latin letters. Today there is one standard, pinyin: it is what you learn pronunciation from and what you type with. But for about a century before it, English-speaking readers knew China through Wade–Giles. That is why the same people and places come in two spellings: Mao Tse-tung and Mao Zedong, Taoism and Daoism, Peking and Beijing. 中国 is Zhōngguó in pinyin and Chung-kuo in Wade–Giles.

The ways Chinese is written in Latin letters

• Pinyin — Latin letters with tone marks: nǐ hǎo. The official system of the People’s Republic of China since 1958 and an international standard (ISO) since 1982. Every textbook and dictionary uses it, and so does the Chinese keyboard on your phone. Every syllable with a recording is in the pinyin chart.
• Wade–Giles — the older English-based system, with apostrophes and hyphens: Mao Tse-tung, Chou En-lai. Thomas Wade, a British diplomat, worked it out in the mid-19th century; Herbert Giles fixed it in his Chinese–English dictionary of 1892.
• Postal spellings — old names of cities used on maps and stamps: Peking, Nanking, Tsingtao. They are neither Wade–Giles nor pinyin, and the beer Tsingtao still carries one.
• Zhuyin (bopomofo) — not letters at all, but a set of special symbols used in Taiwan to teach children to read.
• Cantonese spellings — names that came to English from Cantonese, not from Mandarin: Hong Kong, Sun Yat-sen. They follow the sounds of another language and cannot be converted to pinyin letter by letter.

A beginner needs pinyin, and enough Wade–Giles to recognize old spellings in books and on maps. If the pinyin letters themselves are new to you, start with the article on the Chinese alphabet.

Pinyin vs Wade–Giles: why the spellings changed

Both systems try to solve the same problem: Chinese has pairs of consonants that English doesn’t tell apart. Chinese b and p are both voiceless and differ only by the puff of air after them — b is like the p in “spin”, p like the p in “pin”. Wade–Giles wrote the pair as p and p’, with an apostrophe for the puff. On paper that is precise. In practice, newspapers, maps and typesetters dropped the apostrophes, and two different sounds ended up as one letter.

Pinyin uses spare letters instead: b for the sound without a puff, p for the one with it, and the same for d–t, g–k, z–c, zh–ch, j–q. Nothing needs to be dropped, and a word can be typed on any keyboard: type zhongguo and pick 中国. After the PRC adopted pinyin, the rest of the world gradually followed — the UN, news agencies, libraries. Today Beijing, Guangzhou and Xi Jinping are written in pinyin everywhere.

Wade–Giles has not disappeared. In Taiwan, which officially moved to the same pinyin in 2009, many established names and personal names keep the old style: Taipei (pinyin Táiběi), Kaohsiung (Gāoxióng), the surname Tsai (Cài). And English keeps a handful of names older than any system: China, Hong Kong, Tibet, Confucius.

Pinyin and Wade–Giles: conversion table

Many syllables look the same in both systems: ma, li, lan, hao. Below are the pairs that differ — enough to turn most Wade–Giles names in an old book into pinyin.

Two more details. Wade–Giles joins the syllables of a word with hyphens (Chou En-lai, Chung-kuo), while pinyin writes them as one word (Zhou Enlai, Zhongguo). And tones: Wade–Giles marks them with small raised numbers, pinyin with marks over the vowel — and in everyday texts both are usually left out.

Why no spelling teaches you to pronounce Chinese

Romanization is a way to write Chinese, not a pronunciation guide in English letters. It goes wrong in three places.

• Different sounds, same letters. In Wade–Giles zh and j are both “ch”, ch and q are both “ch’”. The syllables 知 and 鸡 are chih and chi, as if they started with the same consonant. They don’t: in zh the tongue tip curls back and the sound is hard; in j the tongue lies flat, pressed to the palate with its middle, and the sound is soft. Listen: zhīchih jīchi and chīch’ih qīch’i.
• No tones. 买 mǎi — to buy and 卖 mài — to sell are both “mai” in a newspaper. The meaning of a word rides on its melody, and plain letters don’t carry it. On the tones themselves, see Chinese tones.
• Pinyin letters are not English letters. Pinyin is exact, but only by its own rules. Read it the English way and you get “Bay-zhing” for Beijing (pinyin j is close to the j in “jeep”), “King” for Qing, “Zee” for Xi. q, x, c, z and zh never mean what an English reader expects. Compare: qīng xí cài.

There are smaller traps, too. b, d and g in pinyin are not voiced like English b, d, g: they differ from p, t, k by the puff of air. r is close to the s in “pleasure”, and e is nothing like the e in “bed”. How these sounds really work is explained in the article on the sounds of Chinese.

Your first ten Chinese words in pinyin and Wade–Giles

Read them in this order: listen to the recording first, then look at the pinyin. The Wade–Giles line is there so you can recognize the word in older books, not as a guide to the sound. All the words come from the first lessons of the course; for the rest, see the HSK 1 word list.

• 你好nǐhǎohelloWade–Giles: ni hao
• 谢谢xièxiethank youWade–Giles: hsieh-hsieh
• 再见zàijiàngoodbyeWade–Giles: tsai-chien
• 中国ZhōngguóChinaWade–Giles: Chung-kuo
• 汉语HànyǔChinese (language)Wade–Giles: Han-yü
• 老师lǎoshīteacherWade–Giles: lao-shih
• 学生xuéshengstudentWade–Giles: hsüeh-sheng
• 朋友péngyoufriendWade–Giles: p’eng-yu
• 人rénpersonWade–Giles: jen
• 今天jīntiāntodayWade–Giles: chin-t’ien

Look at 谢谢: an English reader sees xiè and wants to say “zee-eh” or “ksee-eh”. Wade–Giles writes hsieh, which at least hints that the sound is neither s nor sh. In fact pinyin x is a soft sound between the two, said with the tongue tip behind the lower teeth — roughly “shyeh-shyeh”. That is exactly why spelling and sound are best kept apart.

How to write Chinese names in English

• Surname first, given name in one word. The surname comes first and is usually one syllable; the given name has one or two, and two are written together without a hyphen: Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Xi Jinping. So “President Xi”, not “President Jinping”. Wade–Giles hyphenated the given name: Mao Tse-tung, Teng Hsiao-p’ing.
• Place names in one word. Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Zhongguo — no space and no hyphen between syllables.
• An apostrophe where syllables could be misread. When a syllable starting with a, o or e follows another, pinyin puts an apostrophe between them: Xi’an (two syllables, xī ān), not xian (one). The same goes for Chang’an, the old name of Xi’an, and for Tian’anmen (天安门), which English usually simplifies to Tiananmen.
• Established names stay. Hong Kong, Taipei, Confucius, Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek keep their familiar forms, even though pinyin would give something else.

To read an unfamiliar name, split the pinyin into syllables and find each one in the pinyin chart, where every syllable has a recording.