Rendering Chinese languages in the Roman alphabet is a difficult problem, as Chinese uses a number of sounds not found in English or other European languages and vice versa. Several "romanization" systems have been developed that attempt to bridge the gap; the two most widely known are the Hanyu Pinyin (literally Chinese-language Spelled-sound) system developed in China in the 1950s and Wade-Giles, which was developed by two British diplomats at the end of the 19th century. To make things even more confusing, most place names in China were written by English-speakers using the Chinese Postal Map Romanization, which gave us the oddities of Peking for modern Beijing and Keelong for modern Jilong. The People's Republic of China declared that the Hanyu Pinyin system was the only acceptable sys