Chapter categories

The following list is designed for users unfamiliar with written Chinese who wish to check place names appearing on notes, usually as overprints. For this reason, the arrangement is based on the number of strokes in the first character, normally found at the right or top. This is a selected list. Some obscure locations have been omitted.

English names are a mixture of popular names or variants thereon, which appear on notes, and Wade-Giles romanizations for places which lack well established English names.

Chinese place names tend to be simple descriptive terms relating to a geographical feature, e.g., “north of the lake” (Hupei), “southern capital” (Nanking) or “on the sea” (Shanghai). Most provincial names show this characteristic. In the latter case, many are paired, which has the disadvantage to the western eye and ear of making them look and sound much the same. Hunan-Hupei, Honan-Hopei, Kwangtung-Kwangsi, Kiangsu-Kiangsi (plus Kiangnan on older notes) and Shantung-Shansi are not difficult to confuse. The most serious problem, however, is Shansi-Shensi. Here, the last characters are the same rather than the first but the first characters, if pronounced correctly, differ only in tone. Even the meanings are close. Shansi, literally, is “mountains west,” while Shensi is “mountain passes west,” although the first character in this instance is not often used in this meaning. The difference in English spelling is generally accepted convention. Chinese find no difficulty in keeping the two separated because the tonal difference is sufficient in the spoken language and written forms for the first characters are totally dissimilar.

Westerners who might be tempted to consider these or other problems in terminology as resulting from mysterious oriental processes should first appraise their own place names, which are rarely as logical or as simple. Inconsistent spellings of place names in romanization too, are primarily western rather than Chinese errors. If confusion does arise, the reasons are complex, and, in any event, no totally satisfactory solution has yet been found.

The concordance follows the supplied five-pair worksheet layout. Historical spellings, province attributions and visual glyph order are retained.

The above chart listings are taken from “CHINESE BANKNOTES” by Ward D. Smith and Brian Matravers (published 1970).