TY - JOUR T1 - “Spelling like a State”: Some Thoughts on the Manchu Origins of the Wade-Giles System PY - 2015 N2 - Today, hanyu pinyin reigns supreme as the system of Romanising Mandarin Chinese, and the hegemony of the system is so great that sometimes even educated readers now think that alternative ways of transcribing Chinese are erroneous. This article is not an attempt to rescue Wade-Giles from oblivion, but to raise the question about to what extent the Wade-Giles system was the product of Manchu knowledge of Chinese. I shall tentatively argue that the Wade-Giles system was a product of two imperialisms, and try to show how the Manchu language provided an interface for those imperialisms. JF - Central Asiatic Journal JA - Central Asiatic Journal VL - 58 IS - 1-2 UR - https://doi.org/10.13173/centasiaj.58.1-2.0037 M3 - doi:10.13173/centasiaj.58.1-2.0037 ER -