Magistrates of Hell

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Since the normalization of Communist China’s relations with Western countries in the 1970s, the system known as pinyin, by which spoken Chinese is transliterated into the Western, or ‘roman’, alphabet, has gradually superseded the earlier system of transcription – the ‘Wade-Giles’ method, which dates from the mid-nineteenth century. In 1982, pinyin was adopted as the ‘official’ method, and all Western books on China now use it.

This made for an awkward choice in writing a novel which takes place in China in the fall of 1912.

I eventually decided to use the old Wade-Giles system to transcribe the spoken Chinese of the story’s characters – and all personal and place names – for two reasons. First, it was the system in use at the time in which Magistrates of Hell takes place: Englishmen would have referred to China’s capital as Peking rather than Beijing, and the nineteen-year-old student laboring in the First Provincial Normal School of Hunan would have been called Mao Tse-tung (or Mao Tse Tung) rather than Mao Zedong. (The Chairman does not, by the way, appear in this novel.)

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