A Few Names of Chinese Places That Have Fallen out of Use
When it comes to Romanizing Chinese language, for the most part two systems in the past. The older system is called Wade-Giles, created in the 19th century by two Christian missionaries to China. The newer system, the official system in wide use nowadays, is the Pinyin system, which was established by the Chinese government after 1949.
Because of the transition from Wade-Giles to Pinyin, names of many Chinese places now are often spelled differently from they used to be. For instance, Hsian to Xian. Changes of this nature are predictable as they follow rules clearly outlined in the Wade-Giles and Pinyin system.
There are, however, some names of Chinese places which do not fall in this category; they had origins independent of either Wade-Giles or Pinyin.
The name Canton, for instance, was old French for Guangzhou, sounded in Cantonese, the dialect spoken in that part of China. Actually, given the way it was pronunced, it was most like that Canton originally referred to Guangdong, the province in which the city Guangzhou is located.
Not too far away from Canon, also on the coast, there was Amoy, or Xiamen. Amoy is roughly how Xiamen is sounded in the Northern Min dialect spoken in Southeast China.
Far up north, in Manhuria, there were Mukden and Dairen. Mukden is said refer to Chinese "Shengjing", which was how the city was known during the Qing dynasty. Before the Manchu conquered the whole of China and founded the Qing dynasty, they had lived in, well, Manchuria, with their capital in Shengjing, which means "thriving capital" in Chinese. The word "Dairen" seems to have come from Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese name for this beautiful port city located on the tip of the Liaodong peninsula. Russian for the same city is Dalny. In the late 19th and early 20th century the Japanese and Russians contended for supremacy in East Asia, and this period of history left its marks, or scars, on China.
Partly because of this, the Chinese have always tried to avoid the term "Manchuria" or its Chinese equivalent "Manzhou." They'd rather use Dongbei ("Northest") or Dongsansheng ("Three Northeastern Provinces") to refer to that part of China.
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