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

Take the surname 李. In Macau's official spelling it is Lei. On the mainland it is Li. In Hong Kong it is Lee — and also Li, both of them, on the same government page, for two different men.

That is not sloppiness. Two of those three places have no rule to be sloppy about, and one of them has a 226-page book.

Macau's book

On 11 October 1985 Macau published a decree approving a codified syllabary for romanising Cantonese. The decree itself is one page. Its annex runs from page 2781 to page 3006 of the gazette supplement — 226 pages — and every entry is the same three things: a Chinese character, its romanisation, and a numeric code.

The numeric code is the Chinese Commercial Code, the four-digit telegraphic numbering that predates the decree by a century. The 1985 law made quoting it compulsory alongside the name, so an official document carried the character, the spelling and the number together, and any one of the three could be checked against the other two.

The decree's stated purpose was to stop inconsistency in romanising proper names. Its article 2 bluntly made the fixed romanisation mandatory in all official documents.

What changed in 2024, which most descriptions have not caught up with

Article 2 no longer reads that way, and article 3 no longer exists.

A 2024 law amending the Civil Registry Code, in force from 1 July 2024, rewrote article 2 to begin "save where the law provides otherwise" — a saving clause the 1985 text did not have — and repealed article 3 outright. The telegraphic code requirement is simply gone, and the government's own explanatory note gives the reason in one line: registering a name in Chinese characters no longer needs a code number.

The saving clause matters because the same law supplied the exception. The Civil Registry Code now says that when a name is registered in Chinese, the syllabary's romanisation is used — or, where the declarant requests it, the official romanisation of the mainland, Hong Kong or Taiwan. The registrar may ask for documents to support the choice, and falls back to the syllabary if the doubt is not resolved.

So the correct description today is not "mandatory". It is a default with three named alternatives, and a parent registering a birth may choose among them.

The most telling detail comes from comparing the bill as submitted with the text that passed. The government proposed dropping the tie to the syllabary altogether; the legislature put the syllabary back as the default and added the three-way election. The opt-out was written by the parliament, not the administration.

Hong Kong has no rule at all

The obvious assumption is that Hong Kong has something similar, just less formal. It has nothing.

Searching the full statute book — ordinances, subsidiary legislation and instruments — for romanisation, romanization, romanised, Pinyin and phonetic returns zero results bearing on personal names.

What the law does require is that a romanised name exist. The identity card regulation says the card shall carry the holder's full name "in English or in English and Chinese". The Births and Deaths Registration Ordinance says a Chinese entry shall be "in both the English and the Chinese languages". Neither names a system, a table or an authority, and the chain of derivation stops there: the ID card copies the birth certificate, and the birth certificate copies whatever was written down.

The clearest evidence that no system exists sits in the interpretation ordinance itself, which manages to spell 九龍 two different ways inside a single sentence — defining Kowloon as a portion of the peninsula of Kaulung.

For place names the government has said as much directly: the naming of geographical places is not subject to any statutory regulation, and adopted names are not meant to be legally binding. The closest thing to a stated method concerns streets rather than people, and even that is hedged — the English name is "normally" the Cantonese romanisation of the Chinese, except when it isn't.

The mainland does not take part in the question

The Language Law makes Hanyu Pinyin the unified standard for spelling Chinese personal and place names in Roman letters. ⚠️ If you go looking for it, note that the provision moved: the law was revised in December 2025 and took effect on 1 January 2026, and pinyin is now Article 20. Article 18 — the number most sources still cite — is now the article about dialects.

And pinyin is spelled from Putonghua. The national standard on romanising Chinese personal names says so explicitly: Han names are spelled according to Putonghua. Its only exception is for ethnic-minority languages, keyed to the language of the name rather than the region of the speaker. Cantonese is classified as a dialect of Chinese, so a Cantonese speaker in Guangzhou gets a Mandarin spelling of their own name, and the standard does not discuss the matter.

The same characters, three ways

Macau's column is read from the statutory syllabary itself. Hong Kong's is read from a bilingual official roster where the English and Chinese lists run in the same order, so the pairings are the government's own.

⚠️ Do not read more into this than it says. Half of the common surnames give no territorial signal whatever — 陳, 吳, 何 and, per the syllabary, 黃 are spelled identically in Hong Kong and Macau. Only 李, 梁, 鄭 and 張 separate cleanly. A spelling is weak evidence of where someone is from, and no evidence at all on its own.

One widely repeated belief is that Macau writes 黃 as Vong. This is wrong. The syllabary prescribes Wong. Vong is attested in Macau usage, and the law has three doors it can come through: spellings fixed before 1986 are grandfathered, an ID card may carry a name over from a foreign passport, and since 2024 a declarant may elect another territory's system.

What this means if you are converting a name

There is no such thing as "the Cantonese romanisation" of a name. There is a Macau statutory spelling, a Hong Kong spelling that is whatever was written on a form decades ago, and a mainland spelling that is not Cantonese at all.

So a converter can tell you what a system would produce; it cannot tell you what is on someone's document. Our Chinese name romanizer shows the same name across Hanyu Pinyin, Wade-Giles, Tongyong and Cantonese side by side for exactly that reason, and if you want the underlying Cantonese syllable rather than a name spelling, our Jyutping converter gives it in a system designed for linguistics rather than for registry clerks.

Where this comes from, and what will date it

The decree, its 226-page annex, the 2024 amending law and the current Civil Registry Code were read from the gazette and the government legal database, not from summaries. This matters, because the most commonly repeated description of the Macau rule is the pre-2024 one. The Hong Kong finding is a full-text search of the official legislation index. The mainland provisions are the revised Language Law and the national romanisation standard.

Three limits. The committee report explaining why the legislature added the three-way election runs to 135 pages and is published only as page images, so the reasoning behind the most interesting part of this story is not something we have read. No instrument was found tying Macau passport spelling to the register, though it evidently follows it. And Hong Kong's pre-1997 records were not searched — a colonial administrative instruction is exactly where a rule would sit if one ever existed, so "no statute" is a statement about the current statute book and not about all of history.

This guide will be dated by another amendment to the Civil Registry Code, or by Hong Kong publishing a romanisation table for the first time. The second would be the bigger news, and there is no sign of it.