On the spelling of Chinese names, we recall wistfully The Four Lads, a Canadian group whose 1953 swing-style song “It’s Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” once topped the charts. This was their refrain: “Istanbul was Constantinople / Now it’s Istanbul, not Constantinople / Been a long time gone, Constantinople / Why did Constantinople get the works? / That’s nobody business but the Turks.” Yet alas, in the case of China, it has become everybody’s business, since name changes for both places and people have gone viral since the advent of the People’s Republic in 1949.
Most of us realize that Beijing was once called Peking (and for a brief transition period, Peiping). But how many know that the celebrated trading port of Canton is now Guangzhou, and that Hong Kong in phonetically correct Mandarin is Xianggang? Or recognize Chiang Kai-shek as Jiang Jieshi? These changes became official when the People’s Republic formally adopted the pinyin system of romanization in place of Wade-Giles, the method devised in late Victorian times by Sir Thomas Francis Wade, a polyglot diplomat, and Herbert Allen Giles, a linguistic scholar at Cambridge University. To compound this perplexity, the Taiwan Nationalist regime still employs Wade-Giles, as did the Metropolitan Museum through the 1990s—and early in the twentieth century, the Chinese Post Office published its own geographic lists, which were widely adopted by Protestant missionary publications. Moreover, within China itself, the same cities over time acquire many names; there are currently said to be 25 million place names in the national database—some descriptive or commemorative, others ideological or abusive (Beijing itself has had 22 names).
Our pragmatic compromise is twofold: When quoting others, we respect spellings in the original text; then in our own narrative, we initially give both pre- and post-pinyin names of places and persons and then favor current usage. Still, inconsistency is unavoidable, since our chapters are thematic and weave back and forth over two centuries. To help the reader decipher varying usages, we append an alphabetical list of key place names, with before and after usages specified.
We adhere to a similar flexibility concerning personal names. It is Chinese practice to place the family name before the given name, which sounds simple, since there are reputedly just over a hundred traditional family names. But as Frances Wood, the emeritus director of the Chinese Department at the British Library, notes in her valuable Companion to China (1988), in traditional usage there can also be multiple given names: “a ‘milk’ name, a ‘study’ or ‘school’ name, and a ‘studio’ name at the very least, with boys sometimes given girls’ names when small so that evil spirits wouldn’t realize they are treasured sons.”
Here again, we respect our quoted sources and try as best we can to reconcile familiarity with correct usage. But when the Chinese emigrate, exceptions can occur. For example, the Princeton scholar and former consultative chairman of the Metropolitan Museum’s Department of Asian Art follows his own styling: Wen Fong. Also, Chinese-born scholars in North America may choose a more accessible given name. Thus the Peabody Essex Museum Curator Yiyou Wang has become Daisy Wang. Where needed, we try in our index to take account of such variations. Finally, we include a selective chronology of key events in our narrative, especially helpful as a guide since our chapters can move on independent temporal tracks. Thus the section on Harvard’s dominion of twentieth-century Sinology bypasses the parallel rise of such formidable collectors as J. P. Morgan, Charles Lang Freer, and John D. Rockefeller Jr., none of whom were Sons of Harvard. Still, this is consistent with the abiding appeal of an ancient civilization in which the shortest distance between points very often is a wriggling line.
A final note concerning illustrations: Owing to cost constraints, we had to limit the number of images of art objects described in the text. However, most of them are available on the relevant museums’ websites.