Nanking (historical romanization)
The older English romanization of Nanjing, found throughout historical English-language sources.
Nanjing connection: Same city, earlier English name — essential for reading historical sources, archives, and institution names.
Key facts
- 'Nanking' is the older English romanization of 南京, standardized under the Chinese postal romanization system.
- English-language books, newspapers, treaties, and institution names from before the widespread adoption of pinyin generally use 'Nanking'.
- 'Nanjing' is the pinyin romanization in standard use today.
- Researchers searching English archives for Nanjing history usually need to search both spellings.
Why this matters to Nanjing
Anyone tracing Nanjing’s history through English-language sources — family papers, university records, newspapers, treaties — will meet the spelling “Nanking”. Knowing that both names denote the same city is the first step in almost any archival research this community undertakes.
Nanjing connection
The same city under an earlier romanization. Many historical events, institutions, and documents are indexed in English under “Nanking”.
Related pages
See Nanjing.
Editorial notes
Seed page kept deliberately narrow: it covers the romanization itself. Historical events referred to in English with the “Nanking” name deserve their own carefully sourced entity pages, written with appropriate care and review — they are expansion candidates, not content to summarize casually here.
Sources
- Wikipedia: Nanjing — wikipedia, license: cc-by-sa · original
License: Original ANJSO synthesis, CC BY 4.0; facts cited to the sources below