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...
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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 passpo...
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...
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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 num...
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...
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 on...
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 T...
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 st...
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 fixe...
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 s...
Why two calculators give you different birth charts
The same birth details can produce different charts because the tradition has argued for centuries about when a day begi...
What happens to Chinese punctuation when text runs vertically
Turning Chinese sideways does not turn its punctuation sideways. Quotation marks become different characters entirely, t...
There is no single order to learn Chinese characters
There are at least four orderings, built for different jobs, and they disagree about the first hundred characters more t...
Why Tet and Chinese New Year sometimes fall a month apart
In 1985 Vietnam celebrated on 21 January and China on 20 February. The explanation everyone gives for the usual one-day...
The h in Cantonese Yale is not a sound
At the start of a syllable the h is the consonant you expect. At the end it is silent — it marks the tone. Beginners pro...
The pattern behind the order of the 64 hexagrams
The I Ching's numbered sequence has a strict rule running through it that almost no introduction mentions — and you can...
Why your Singapore birth certificate time is an hour off the sun
The clock here runs about 65 minutes ahead of the sun, and it ran half an hour closer before 1982. If you are entering a...
Is 2027 a year without spring?
It is — the lunar year from 6 February 2027 contains no 立春, and you can check it against a government table in ninety...
Why most lunar calendar apps get 2033 wrong
There is one year in the next century where lunar calendar apps disagree with each other. Ask yours where the leap month...
Mid-Autumn is two days before the full moon this year
The festival lands on 25 September and the moon reaches full on the 27th. The gap is larger than usual, it is one day ra...
What Links the 36 Stratagems to the Art of War's 13 Chapters
The two are separate books a thousand years apart, so a stratagem filed under a chapter is a reading aid, not a lineage....
How Well Attested Are the 36 Stratagems?
The Thirty-Six Stratagems are introduced as ancient military history. Reading all thirty-six origin texts end to end, tw...
How Chinese Given Names Actually Work — and Why Everyone Picks the Same Ones
A person could once carry four names: a milk name, a generation character shared with every cousin, a given name, and a...
Tracing Chinese Ancestry in Southeast Asia: Start With How Your Name Is Spelled
Tan, Chan and Chin are the same character. Which one is on your IC records which dialect group your family belonged to,...
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