The Romanization of Chinese Toponyms

Starting from the Yuan period (XIV century) and, after a break of about one century, from the end of the Ming (late XVI century) onwards, Westerners who traveled or stayed in China (merchants, missionaries, diplomats, etc..) left written records, in which they obviously cited Chinese names and expressions in alphabetical transcriptions, in an attempt to render the Chinese pronunciation. The use of phonetic transcription (i.e. Romanization) was a crucial tool for ‘translating’ the Chinese world to the West, eventually becoming important also for the Chinese themselves. Medieval sources (Marco Polo above all) and the first reports of missionaries and travelers of the 16th century presented rather unstable orthographic renditions of Chinese terms. Only at the end of the 16th century, with the first lexicographic materials (glossaries and manuscript dictionaries) written by missionaries in China, we begin to recognize authentic Romanization ‘systems'. It must be noticed that, regardless to which kind of document we take into consideration, Chinese place names (along with personal names) were very common. As a matter of fact, with the exception of a few purely linguistic works like grammars, in most of the other sources (relations, letters, historical accounts, philosophical treatises, lexicographic materials and - of course - cartographic materials) we can easily encounter toponyms, often in huge amount. The geographical information in these writings provided precious data to the Western cartographers, who used them to make the first maps of China, and Asia in general. However, since they were mostly based on reported information, the spellings of place names in these maps were often inconsistent, and became even worse in later reprints and editions due to mistakes made by the copyists or the printers. Conversely, information and data were transcribed in a coherent and precise way by those authors who lived in China and were experts in the Chinese language, and could also access the Chinese sources, as in the case of the earliest 'atlases' of China made respectively by the Jesuits Michele Ruggieri (ms. late 1590s), Martino Martini (1655) and MichaƗ Boym (ms., early 1690s). The new maps of Western cartographers based on these direct sources were much more organic and, from the point of view of transcription, had greater internal coherence. The culmination of the encounter between Chinese and European cartographies was possibly reached when Emperor Kangxi (1654-1722) commissioned the French Jesuits at his court to compile a new general atlas of the empire in collaboration with the imperial cartographers, which was then published in 1717. A ‘translated’ (i.e. Romanized) version was then published in Europe in 1735; besides revolutionizing the image of the Chinese territory in the eyes of Western public, it also became a new reference for the Romanization of Chinese place names. But the problem of the Romanization of Chinese toponyms was not solved, and it continued to puzzle the various authors (sinologists, orientalists, polymaths, etc..) of each period, leading to the publication of detailed lists or catalogs of Chinese place names, where the differennt Romanized or Latinized forms of the toponyms were listed and compared, as in the case of the Dictionnaire of Édouard Biot (1842), or the Catalogus of Giuseppe Novella (1854). This chapter offers some clues to interpret the Romanizations employed in the maps of China for the timespan covered by this volume, placing these cartographic materials in the broader panorama of the ‘Romanized’ sources.