Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (Chinese)/Transcription of Chinese
It seems to me that this article increases rather than solves the confusion in this matter. The contents should probably be integrated with those about pinyin, the increasingly more accepted way of romanizing Chinese. The point raised by the article's author in "How should these names and words from Chinese language properly be represented in written English?" misses the entire point. Romanization is not anglicization. Pinyin is a system for the transliteration of Chinese into the roman alphabet that can be applied in a context of any language that uses that alphabet. If the letters chosen have phonetic values contrary to their English values, that's the way it is. Representing Chinese in written English is terribly ethnocentric.
It should also be noted that at the time of the 1911 encyclopaedia, even the Wade-Giles system did not exist as the most common method of representing Chinese in English contexts. This simply means that the usages in that work are a generation further removed from current usage. One also needs to ask whether the old transcription was based on Cantonese, Mandarin or some other pronunciation. A cookie-cutter approach is not reliable. Eclecticology, Monday, April 29, 2002