page_title: Wade–Giles
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Wade–Giles / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Photograph in Album of photographs of Peking and its environs.
context_page_description: Wade–Giles is a romanization system for Mandarin Chinese. It developed from a system produced by Thomas Francis Wade, during the mid-19th century, and was given completed form with Herbert A. Giles's Chinese–English Dictionary of 1892.
  Wade–Giles was the system of transcription in the English-speaking world for most of the 20th century. Wade–Giles is based on the Beijing dialect, whereas the Nanjing dialect-based romanization systems were in common use until the late 19th century. Both were used in postal romanizations. In mainland China it has been mostly replaced by the Hanyu Pinyin romanization system, with exceptions for the romanized forms of some locations, persons and other proper nouns. The romanized name for some locations, persons and other proper nouns in Taiwan is based on the Wade–Giles derived romanized form, for example Kaohsiung, the Matsu Islands and Chiang Ching-kuo.
context_section_description: Wade–Giles was developed by Thomas Francis Wade, a scholar of Chinese and a British ambassador in China who was the first professor of Chinese at Cambridge University. Wade published in 1867 the first textbook on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin in English, Yü-yen Tzŭ-erh Chi (simplified Chinese: 语言自迩集; traditional Chinese: 語言自邇集), which became the basis for the romanization system later known as Wade–Giles. The system, designed to transcribe Chinese terms for Chinese specialists, was further refined in 1892 by Herbert Allen Giles (in A Chinese-English Dictionary), a British diplomat in China and his son, Lionel Giles, a curator at the British Museum.
  Taiwan used Wade–Giles for decades as the de facto standard, co-existing with several official romanizations in succession, namely, Gwoyeu Romatzyh (1928), Mandarin Phonetic Symbols II (1986), and Tongyòng Pinyin (2000). With the election of the Kuomintang party in Taiwan in 2008, Taiwan officially switched to Hànyǔ Pīnyīn. However, many people in Taiwan, both native and overseas, use or transcribe their legal names in the Wade–Giles system, as well as the other aforementioned systems.
caption: Thomas Francis Wade and officers in China, 1879.
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