Reminder from China's Airport Codes

Few people may realize that Beijing's Capital Airport is coded as PEK, Guangzhou's Baiyun Airport as CAN, Nanjing's Lukou Airport as NKG, Chongqing's Jiangbei Airport as CKG, Qingdao Airport as TAO, and the lesser-known Zhengzhou Airport as CGO. These codes reflect a time when these cities were familiar to the Western world. As China's airport system began to develop, it naturally adopted the romanization practices prevalent at the time.

The Cantonese language played a significant role in shaping China's early diplomatic interactions with the Western world. English-language world history textbooks used in Hong Kong from the 1970s to the 1990s referred to Beijing as Peking, Qingdao as Tsingtao, Nanjing as Nanking, and Guangzhou as Canton. In the late Qing dynasty, the Wade-Giles romanization system became widely adopted and served as the standard method for transliterating Chinese words until the introduction of Hanyu Pinyin in 1958. The preservation of the original names of prominent institutions such as Tsinghua University and Peking University in Beijing serves as a reminder of this historical legacy.

By the 1970s, Hanyu Pinyin (漢語拼音) had become widely used as China actively promoted Putonghua (Mandarin) as the nation's official common language. Unfortunately, this effort often came at the expense of local dialects and regional languages, which were frequently suppressed or even banned in schools. Overzealous attempts to demonstrate loyalty to a unified language policy can sometimes backfire, particularly in a world where preserving cultural heritage has become increasingly important. If this trend continues, we may witness the extinction of Cantonese and many other Chinese dialects, a tragic loss for linguistic and cultural diversity.

August 25, 2025