Chinese Name → Pinyin

How Chinese names are written in Pinyin

Hanyu Pinyin is the official romanization of Mandarin Chinese (ISO 7098) and the spelling used on mainland Chinese passports. The national standard for personal names, GB/T 28039-2011 《中国人名汉语拼音字母拼写规则》, sets a handful of rules that are easy to get wrong:

• Family name first. 王小明 is Wang Xiaoming. English-language CVs, bookings and bylines often reverse this to Xiaoming Wang, so when order matters, mark the surname — the standard allows capitals for it: WANG Xiaoming.
• The given name is one word. A two-character given name is joined: Wang Xiaoming, not Wang Xiao Ming or Wang Xiao-Ming.
• Compound surnames are one word too. 欧阳娜娜 → Ouyang Nana; 司马光 → Sima Guang.
• An apostrophe marks an ambiguous syllable break. When a syllable beginning with a, o or e follows another syllable, it is separated: 王西安 → Wang Xi'an (two syllables), which would otherwise read as Wang Xian (王先).
• Tone marks are optional. Everyday writing and official documents leave them out; use them in teaching material, dictionaries, or anywhere pronunciation is the point.

On passports and ID documents

Mainland Chinese passports print the name in capital letters without tone marks, with surname and given name in separate fields: 张小明 → surname ZHANG, given name XIAOMING. The machine-readable zone can only hold the letters A–Z, so ü cannot appear. Current practice writes it as YU — 吕 is LYU, as in the weightlifter 吕小军, registered as LYU Xiaojun — but older documents and foreign systems often show LU or LV for the same name.

For forms, visas and tickets, copy the spelling from the person's own document instead of regenerating it. The ALL CAPS line above follows the YU convention.

Surnames with a special reading

Many characters are read differently when they are a family name. A generic converter uses the everyday reading and produces a name nobody answers to. This tool applies the surname reading:

Some families keep a local or everyday reading, so the person's own documents outrank any rule.

Names that are not written in Pinyin

Many Chinese names outside mainland China use other romanizations, which this tool does not produce. Converting them “back” to Pinyin gives a spelling the person has never used:

• Hong Kong and Macau follow Cantonese: 陈 Chan, 黄 Wong.
• Taiwan mostly uses Wade-Giles or its variants: 张 Chang, 谢 Hsieh — see the Wade-Giles converter and Taiwan name spelling.
• Singapore and Malaysia follow Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese and other dialects: 陈 Tan, 林 Lim — see Singapore Chinese names.