Chinese place spellings

I assume you are talking about English-language maps. This question is actually quite complicated. You will have to figure out if the map is using pinyin or not. Which should be quite easy--it won't have any apostrophes, ts's, etc. That is, it will only have the limited group of pinyin sounds/spellings. Undoubtedly though, you will come across some maps that use Wade-Giles or some other system. Chances are, if it looks like pinyin, it is. For example, if you see "qing dao", you know this is pinyin. Otherwise it would be "ts'ing tao" or "ching tao" or "ching dao" or something. The latter three are not ever seen in pinyin, but as you may know, one of them is the spelling used on the Chinese beer. :-) If you buy the map in China, you should be fine. Also, most newer American maps will be fine, too. Can't speak for Europe or elsewhere. Some will still render Nanjing as Nanking, Guangdong as Canton, Beijing as Peking, or Xianggang as Hong Kong. Okay, the last one was a trick because the English name for Hong Kong really is Hong KOng.

Maps of Taiwan often use an odd mixture, one that's likely to get even worse: http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/10/31/asia/AS-GEN-Taiwan-Name-Game.php In Wikipedia you can look at some examples of the different spelling rules. To be honest some of them make sense ("jh" instead of "zh"), but more confusion is NOT what's needed. As for in China... some places may not use the Chinese name. To take the most obvious example, I've yet to see an English atlas refer to ZhongGuo rather than China. Kashgar is utterly different in Chinese, and I assume Urumqi is as well. Um... does Cantonese food still have the same name, even though Canton "no longer exists"? What about Peking duck? My wish for any and all maps, street signs, etc: write in the darn tones! I'm sick to death of knowing all these names with toneless pinyin, but then Taiwanese friends and students have no idea which town/ subway station/ province I'm talking about.

LostInAsia, Re: Taiwan. I heard they are standardizing, so you have it better off than before. Before, the same street would be spelled differently blocks apart. Nanjing Donglu, Nanching Tonglu, etc. You are right though, even in Mainland China, pinyin hasn't replaced ALL words in English. For instance, we say "Beijing", but the university (at least when I was there) was still translated "Peking University" into English.

Very strange really as my understanding is that Hanzi are common to the whole region (and even somewhat in Japan) so it seems roman charecters are making it harder to write not simpler! The only benefit being its simpler to input on a PC! Is there a regional correlation between wade-giles, pinyin etc.?

You can look all this up in Wikipedia for more detail, but basically what happened is the Chinese used to use 注音符號 (zhuyin fuhao) to teach young Chinese how to pronounce characters. It is a series of sounds that look like character fragments. The phrase 注音符號 would be written ㄓㄨˋ ㄧㄣ ㄈㄨˊ ㄏㄠˋ and these words usually appear vertically along side the character as a "clue." For romanization (for foreigners, that is), Wade-Giles was used. It was invented by Giles in the 1800s and modified later by Wades (I think). Anyway, sometime in the 50s pinyin was invented and by the 70s pinyin officially replaced BOTH systems in Mainland China. That meant that both Chinese people and foreigners used pinyin to learn the sounds of characters! Incidentally, Peking and Nanking are NOT Wade-Giles, I am not sure what they are, but they probably represent a phoneticization system based on some non-Mandarin dialect that was spoken by those in power when China first made contact with the non-Chinese world. For instance, "bak king" is how you say "beijing" in Cantonese....as you can see, this is much closer to "peking" than "beijing" is! Since the Nationalists left Mainland China for Taiwan in 1949, they still use 注音符號 and Wade-Giles, and not pinyin, though now, it seems that pinyin is gaining use to replace Wade-Giles, but not yet to replace 注音符號. Most Taiwanese won't be able to read something like "ni yao qu chi fan ma" because they don't know what sound "q" makes or "ch"...i.e., they don't know pinyin.