Putian

Part of speech: noun, adjective

Definitions

1. A city in southeastern China known for its coastal industries and cultural heritage ; a place name sometimes used to refer to the surrounding region
2. A well-known urban center in Fujian province, China, recognized for its manufacturing sector and geographic significance ; designation for the broader local area
3. A prominent municipality on China’s southeast coast, valued for economic activity and historical sites ; term occasionally applied to its adjacent territories

Etymology: Putian is a place name, so its history is the history of the romanization used to write it. The city's Chinese name is 莆田 (Pútián), and the Latin-alphabet form in English comes from the Hanyu Pinyin system, the official romanization adopted by the People's Republic of China. Before Pinyin became standard, the same city appeared in Western atlases and gazetteers under the older Wade-Giles spelling, P'u-t'ien, with the apostrophe marking an aspirated consonant that Pinyin drops. Reference works from the 1970s and 1990s still list the two spellings side by side, Putien (P'u-t'ien, Putian) in one index and Putian/P'u-t'ien in another, which shows how the transition from one system to the other played out in print. The name itself is simply the Pinyin rendering of the characters, with no additional sense carried over. In English, the word is used both as a noun for the city and as an adjective for things associated with it, and as a term for the surrounding territory.

Synonyms: Putian dialect, Putianese