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This guide is designed to allow you to search Chinese syllables written in both pinyin and Wade-Giles spellings, the two most predominant systems of romanization for Chinese characters used in English language documents. Wade-Giles, so-called after the two developers, is an older system sometimes used in Western academic and popular publications. Pinyin, developed and implemented in the People’s Republic of China in the 1950′s, is today the more widely used system.

China’s Reform Era

Over the last thirty years, the People’s Republic of China has undergone a series of dramatic economic and social reforms and consequently developed at an unprecedented rate. An estimated 500 million Chinese people have been brought out of poverty during this period, and an increasing number now count themselves among the country’s growing list of millionaires. At the same time, with China’s increasing prominence on the international scene, especially in its relation to its largest trading partner, the United States, the country’s influence on the world is the strongest it has been in over two hundred years. This dynamic promises to be a defining feature for international relations in the 21st century.

When China first began opening its markets to foreign companies in the early 1980s, few would have suspected that in only thirty years, China would become the largest luxury retail market in the world.

Although some textbooks continue to occasionally refer to the Yellow River valley and the northern plain of north China as the “cradle of Chinese civilization,” spectacular archaeological finds in the 20th and 21st centuries have increasingly challenged the way we see early China and the formation of Chinese civilization during the Bronze Age period (ca. 2000 BCE – 221 BCE).

The discovery in 1976 of Lady [Fu] Hao’s burial tombs near Anyang, in China’s northern Henan Province, presented scholars and archaeologists with an amazing find: the first tomb of the Ruins of Yin burial ground to be discovered undisturbed by looters since the tomb was sealed from the light of day around 1250 BCE.