Jordan: Chinese Names and Terms

Quick References: Period Numbers, China Map, Taiwan Map
Full References: Periods & Reigns, China Map, Taiwan Map

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Chinese Names & Terms Data Base

Preferred Database:	Search Field:	Tone & Character Display Format:
All Data Bases Religious Terms Names of Places Ethnolinguistic Names Archaeological Terms Names of Books Names of Dynasties Names of People* (Excluding Emperors) Names of Gods* Names of Emperors and Reigns* *-Some entries are included in more than one database	keyword only keyword & content	Diacritics (e.g., ā, á, ă, à)* Numbers (e.g., a1 a2 a3 a4) -If display is wrong here, stick with numbers. Simplified 简体字 Priority* Traditional 繁體字 Priority Omit All Chinese Characters -Priorities affect content field only. If different, both forms appear in headers. If display is wrong on this page, it will also be wrong when terms are found. The probable cause is that your computer does not have full Chinese Unicode fonts loaded or "character encoding under the "view" window should be reset to "UTF-8."

Instructions

Enter romanized Chinese syllables, each syllable separately (e.g., dao jiao). Tones may be included or left out, but if included they must be indicated as numbers rather than tone marks (dao or dao4, not dào). The letter ü should be spelled v.

Spellings must be in Pinyin, not Wade-Giles. (Click here to convert.)

For many personal and place names, English translations as well as old or silly spellings (such as "Whampoa" or "Swatow") can often be found by selecting "keyword & content" rather than "keyword."

Using the keyword "full" will elicit the full contents of any listed database other than "all." The display limit is 900 hits.

The original data base limited Chinese characters to the header field. I have begun introducing them into the content field, but many are not there yet. Characters for nearly all Chinese terms in the content field can be found by doing a new search.

Conventions:

All syllables are written as separate words.
The apostrophes used before vowels in some normal compounds are here omitted here, since the spaces show the syllable division. (Hence the single syllable xian contrasts with xi an, not xi'an or xi 'an).
If you enter tones in the search box, they must be written as numbers after the syllables, not as normal tone diacritics. The letter ü should be entered as v.
Capitalization:
1. Surnames are displayed entirely in capital letters (ZHū).
2. Titles are displayed all lower-case (tiān shī).
3. In dynasties and place names the first syllable capitalized (Qing1, Guang3 zhou1).
Many dates are followed by letter abbreviations: (e.g., 1650f) They are:
b=born/begun, d=died, r=reigned, e=ended, f=flourished.
Period designations (e.g., 06e) refer to the breakdown of Chinese history in to periods as used in the table of dynasties on this web site. An abbreviated table of these is available by clicking at the top of this page or the page that displays your hits.
Province designations (e.g., SX) are their official abbreviations. A map locating these is available by clicking at the top of this page or the page that displays your hits. The abbreviations are also directly available in the database as search terms. Unofficial abbreviations used for Taiwan counties and cities are treated similarly.

What is the point of all this?

As a non-Chinese-speaking person struggling for decades to master Chinese, one of my pet peeves is Western-language books about China that do not include Chinese characters or that do not indicate the tones that are critical to pronouncing words in Chinese. One of my first Chinese teachers, now a noted "China specialist," proudly announced to his class, "I don't know the tones, and I see no reason why you should." Another noted "China specialist" told me, "We would be laughed at if we included tones."

(Nearly all romanized Chinese on this web site includes tones. So laugh already.)

For years I have made lists of Chinese terms, titles, names, &c. with both tones and characters. The present data base derives from those lists. It is extremely spotty, but may offer a little help to people who, like me (and unlike that idiot Chinese teacher), would like to know Chinese better than they do. It may also help relieve confusion among people who have no interest in Chinese as language, but seek clarification of terms that are not well explained elsewhere.