Taiwan and Romanization (Day 12)

Date: August 12, 2026

Last modified: August 14, 2026 (13:37 UTC)

It’s well known that the Chinese languages do not use a Latin based alphabet, but rather a ideographic system with characters known as 漢字/hanzi. Nevertheless, in order to learn pronunciation and to type it in keyboards, foreigners and mainland Chinese learn pinyin. It’s pretty easily recognizable as Chinese Technically, recognizable as Mandarin. Other Sinitic languages don’t use it.. Let’s take the following passage:

我的男友叫陳知明。他原本住在重慶，漂洋過海後來，他住在墨西哥城了。

Let’s write it in pinyin (minus the tonal diacritics):

Wo de nanyou jiao Chen Zhiming. Ta yuanben zhu zai Chongqing, piaoyang guohai houlai, ta zhu zai Moxige Cheng le.

I think for Westerners this visually looks Chinese; I think most people seeing this could guess that its probably Chinese.

So we have a standardized romanizing system for Chinese. Awesome! I can’t wait to go to 台中, which in pinyin is Taizhong… but… why can’t I find it? That’s actually is because the name of the city outside of Chinese is actually Taichung. Same with 花蓮 (Hualien, not Hualian), 高雄 (Kaohsiung, not Gaoxiong), and 台北 (Taipei, not Taibei). So, what gives?

Issues of Romanization in Taiwan

What these cities all share in common is that they are cities in Taiwan, and thus use the Wade-Giles romanization system, not pinyin. Wade-Giles predates pinyin, having been developed in the mid-19th century, with pinyin being creatured in the 1950s. Wade-Giles is the system used in Taiwan and can be easily seen by just taking a look at the names of cities and by seeing people’s names. So let’s take a look at that above passage using Wade-Giles:

Wo te nan-yu chiao Ch’en Chih-Ming. T’a yüan-pen chu tsai chung-ch’ing， p’iao-yang-kuo-hai hou-lai, t’a chu tsai mo-hsi-ko-ch’eng le. Going to be so honest, I really don’t understand the rules for hyphenation in Wade-Giles, so forgive these mistakes.

Quite different, isn’t it! Honestly, for aesthetic and pronunciation reasons I think pinyin is far superior… but that’s just my personal belief. Well, at least we have that settled. Mainland China uses pinyin, Taiwan uses Wade-Giles. So that’s why 基隆 is romanized as… Keelung? Why is it not Chilung?

Well, that’s because Keelung comes from the Taiwanese indigenous name for the city, Ke-lâng I can make a whole other post just about the horrors of romanizing the Taiwanese language…. The city was well-known enough as Keelung internationally during the Qing era, so for historical reasons it remains as Keelung. There’s also another historical rabbit hole with the changing of names with Japanese colonization. Kaohsiung, for example, was originally called 打狗/Takao in Taiwanese. When the Japanese took over, they changed the characters to 高雄/Takao in order to retain the pronunciation and to name it after a pre-existing place in Japan. However, when the Republic of China took over, they did not change the characters back and adapted it to Mandarin, so now it’s Kaohsiung (Gaoxiong in pinyin). Maybe a bit of a blessing if not only for 打狗 literally meaning “beating a dog”, although that’s only for the phonetics, as Takao most likely comes form the word “bamboo forest” or from the Makatao tribe. That’s why 太魯閣 is Taroko, not T’ai-lu-ko and 哈瑪星 is Hamasen, not Ha-ma-hsing.

So, there should be no future problems! So, when you plan your trip to Taipei and you want to go to 西門, you should type in… Ximen? Isn’t that… pinyin? Why isn’t it Hsi-men, the Wade-Giles name?!?!?!

Well, what I said earlier wasn’t entirely true. Wade-Giles actually isn’t the system used in Taiwan. It’s also pinyin. To make it even more confusing, Taiwan from 2002-2008 used Tongyong Pinyin, a modified version of pinyin different from Hanyu Pinyin, which we have been discussing. This is why 旗津 is Cijin, not Qijin or Ch’i-chin. All Taipei metro stations use pinyin.

As far as I know, there is truly not much rhyme or reason in figuring out a pattern if a place in Taiwan is going to use pinyin (of either Hanyu or Tongyang variety), Wade-Giles, or use an indigenous name. Good luck!