Eva Chin writes for RECATOOLS on business and commerce in Southeast Asia: the commercial decisions small businesses actually face, and the markets and regulation around them. She also covers Chinese naming and cultural practice, education and qualifications across the region, and the arithmetic of a tropical home. Coverage of cultural practice is educational — it explains what a tradition holds and where it came from, and does not make predictive claims.

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Jul 2026
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Articles · Chinese Culture Showing 1–10 of 25

A classroom pinyin wall chart headed 声母表 and 韵母表, its cells pairing each sound with a small illustration, hanging beside a blackboard.
Chinese Culture

Half the pronunciation changes people argued about had already happened

The viral lists of Chinese readings the ministry supposedly changed trace to a 2016 draft that was never issued. But the draft is a two-column table with a note saying a blank right column means no change — so you can check entry by entry. Two of the most-quoted examples have blank right columns: they have been the rule since 1985.

4 Sep 2026 · 6 min read
The Taipei skyline seen across the city, with Taipei 101 rising above the surrounding buildings.
Chinese Culture

Taiwan's passport rules name no romanisation system at all

The received account is that Taiwan uses Wade-Giles, or 通用拼音, or has moved to Hanyu Pinyin. Article 14 of the passport enforcement rules names none of them. It fixes a script and a source pronunciation and stops there — so the schemes people observe come from a ministry conversion tool rather than from law, and Macau's statutory table is the exact structural opposite.

4 Sep 2026 · 6 min read
Trays of metal letterpress type seen from above, individual raised letter blocks sorted into red compartments, the nearest ones in sharp focus.
Chinese Culture

The letter Chinese passports will not print

Hanyu Pinyin has a letter no Chinese travel document will print: ü. The rule that replaces it is two rules, not one — 吕 becomes LYU but 略 becomes LUE — and the standard everyone cites says only that the change is permitted, while the authority that prints the documents says it is required. Buried in the same notice is a clause letting you keep your old spelling.

2 Sep 2026 · 6 min read
A Chinese calligraphy practice book lying open on a pale desk, its ruled grid squares each holding one traditional character in regular script, with a hand at the right holding a brush pen above the page.
Chinese Culture

花 has seven strokes, and eight, and ten

Count it on the mainland and you get seven. Taiwan's education ministry says eight. A 五格 name reading says ten — a number worked out from an index the Kangxi dictionary never totals, by a method whose own founder said it was not stroke counting at all. Unicode hands your software exactly one of the three and does not say which.

2 Sep 2026 · 10 min read
The wave-patterned Portuguese paving of Senado Square in Macau, with the white Leal Senado building on the left and a pink colonial-era building on the right under an overcast sky.
Chinese Culture

The 226-page book that decides how Macau spells your name

Macau has a statutory table for romanising Cantonese names, running 226 pages of the 1985 gazette. Hong Kong has no rule at all — the word romanisation does not appear anywhere in its statute book. And in 2024 Macau quietly turned its mandate into a default.

2 Sep 2026 · 7 min read
A vertical pink neon sign spelling three Chinese characters, glowing against a dark city street at night with blurred lights behind it.
Chinese Culture

Most 火星文 converters are running the same copied file

Feed the same characters to several Martian-text converters and most agree exactly. That looks like a standard. It is one 3,753-row table copied between sites, a third of whose rows convert a character to itself, and 436 of whose rows cannot be undone.

1 Sep 2026 · 6 min read
A Chinese calligraphy practice sheet printed with traditional characters in a grid, with a black ink stone, a brush and two small jade water droppers resting on top of it.
Chinese Culture

Why a converter turns a toast into an obscenity

干杯 converts to 乾杯 correctly. Insert one character and 干了一杯 comes back 幹了一杯, which reads as an obscenity in Taiwan. The converter did exactly what it was built to do, and the reason it fails explains most of the bad traditional Chinese you will ever see.

1 Sep 2026 · 6 min read
A tray of movable metal printing type, the letters in sharp focus in the foreground.
Chinese Culture

Most advice on writing Chinese dates quotes a standard that was replaced in 2011

The rules for numbers and dates in Chinese publications were revised in 2011. A great deal of guidance, including the style rule governing Chinese Wikipedia, still reproduces the edition it replaced — and one line tells you which you are reading.

1 Sep 2026 · 9 min read
A weathered stone sundial, its gnomon casting a shadow across the engraved dial face.
Chinese Culture

The Chinese festivals that are set by the sun, not the moon

Most Chinese festivals fall on a lunar date, and two of the best known do not. Qingming and the Winter Solstice are fixed by the sun, which is why Qingming takes only three Gregorian dates across two centuries but thirty-two lunar ones.

1 Sep 2026 · 8 min read
A Chinese calligraphy brush resting across a shallow dish of black ink.
Chinese Culture

The character that means a million in Beijing and a million million in Taipei

兆 is the SI prefix for mega on the mainland and for tera in Taiwan. It is not a gap between the two conventions but a swap — each side gives the other's word to the other's number — and Taiwan's own government cannot agree with itself about it.

1 Sep 2026 · 8 min read
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