(), commemorating
Thomas Barclay The history of has been heavily influenced by official attitudes towards the Southern Min vernaculars and the Christian organizations that propagated it. Early documents point to the purpose of the creation of POJ as being pedagogical in nature, closely allied to educating
Christian converts.
Early development The first people to use a romanized script to write Southern Min were Spanish missionaries in
Manila in the 16th century. However, it was used mainly as a teaching aid for Spanish learners of Southern Min, and seems not to have had any influence on the development of . In the early 19th century, China was closed to
Christian missionaries, who instead proselytized to
overseas Chinese communities in
South East Asia. The earliest origins of the system are found in a small vocabulary first printed in 1820 by
Walter Henry Medhurst, who went on to publish the
Dictionary of the Dialect of the Chinese Language, According to the Reading and Colloquial Idioms in 1832. This dictionary represents the first major reference work in POJ, although the romanization within was quite different from the modern system, and has been dubbed
Early Church Romanization by one scholar of the subject. Medhurst, who was stationed in
Malacca, was influenced by
Robert Morrison's romanization of
Mandarin Chinese, but had to innovate in several areas to reflect major differences between Mandarin and Southern Min. Several important developments occurred in Medhurst's work, especially the application of consistent tone markings (influenced by contemporary linguistic studies of
Sanskrit, which was becoming of more mainstream interest to Western scholars). Medhurst was convinced that accurate representation and reproduction of the tonal structure of Southern Min was vital to comprehension: The system expounded by Medhurst influenced later dictionary compilers with regard to tonal notation and initials, but both his complicated vowel system and his emphasis on the literary register of Southern Min were dropped by later writers. Following on from Medhurst's work,
Samuel Wells Williams became the chief proponent of major changes in the orthography devised by Morrison and adapted by Medhurst. Through personal communication and letters and articles printed in
The Chinese Repository a consensus was arrived at for the new version of POJ, although Williams' suggestions were largely not followed. The first major work to represent this new orthography was
Elihu Doty's
Anglo-Chinese Manual with Romanized Colloquial in the Amoy Dialect, published in 1853. The manual can therefore be regarded as the first presentation of a pre-modern POJ, a significant step onwards from Medhurst's orthography and different from today's system in only a few details. From this point on various authors adjusted some of the consonants and vowels, but the system of tone marks from Doty's
Manual survives intact in modern POJ.
John Van Nest Talmage has traditionally been regarded as the founder of POJ among the community which uses the orthography, although it now seems that he was an early promoter of the system, rather than its inventor. In 1842 the
Treaty of Nanking was concluded, which included among its provisions the creation of
treaty ports in which Christian missionaries would be free to preach.
Xiamen (then known as Amoy) was one of these treaty ports, and British, Canadian and American missionaries moved in to start preaching to the local inhabitants. These missionaries, housed in the cantonment of
Gulangyu, created reference works and religious tracts, including a
bible translation. Naturally, they based the pronunciation of their romanization on the speech of Xiamen, which became the de facto standard when they eventually moved into other areas of the Hokkien
Sprachraum, most notably Taiwan. The 1858
Treaty of Tianjin officially opened Taiwan to western missionaries, and missionary societies were quick to send men to work in the field, usually after a sojourn in Xiamen to acquire the rudiments of the language.
Maturity Quanzhou and
Zhangzhou are two major varieties of Southern Min, and in Xiamen they combined to form something "not Quan, not Zhang" – i.e. not one or the other, but rather a fusion, which became known as
Amoy Dialect or
Amoy Chinese. In Taiwan, with its mixture of migrants from both Quanzhou and Zhangzhou, the linguistic situation was similar; although the resulting blend in the southern city of
Tainan differed from the Xiamen blend, it was close enough that the missionaries could ignore the differences and import their system wholesale. The fact that religious tracts, dictionaries, and teaching guides already existed in the Xiamen tongue meant that the missionaries in Taiwan could begin proselytizing immediately, without the intervening time needed to write those materials. Missionary opinion was divided on whether POJ was desirable as an end in itself as a full-fledged orthography, or as a means to literacy in
Chinese characters.
William Campbell described POJ as a step on the road to reading and writing the characters, claiming that to promote it as an independent writing system would inflame nationalist passions in China, where characters were considered a sacred part of Chinese culture. Taking the other side,
Thomas Barclay believed that literacy in POJ should be a goal rather than a
waypoint: A great boon to the promotion of POJ in Taiwan came in 1880 when
James Laidlaw Maxwell, a medical missionary based in
Tainan, started promoting POJ for writing the Bible, hymns, newspapers, and magazines. He donated a small printing press to the local church, which
Thomas Barclay learned how to operate in 1881 before founding the Presbyterian Church Press in 1884. Subsequently, the
Taiwan Prefectural City Church News, which first appeared in 1885 and was produced by Barclay's Presbyterian Church of Taiwan Press, used as
ruby characters Competition for POJ was introduced during the
Japanese era in Taiwan (1895–1945) in the form of
Taiwanese kana, a system designed as a teaching aid and pronunciation guide, rather than an independent orthography like POJ. During the Japanese rule period, the Japanese government began suppressing POJ, banning classes, In 1974, the
Government Information Office banned
A Dictionary of Southern Min, with a government official saying: "We have no objection to the dictionary being used by foreigners. They could use it in mimeographed form. But we don't want it published as a book and sold publicly because of the Romanization it contains. Chinese should not be learning Chinese through Romanization." Also in the 1970s, a POJ
New Testament translation known as the "Red Cover Bible" () was confiscated and banned by the Nationalist regime. Official moves against native languages continued into the 1980s, the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of the Interior decided in 1984 to forbid missionaries to use "local dialects" and romanizations in their work. It was not until the late 1980s, with the lifting of martial law, that POJ slowly regained momentum under the influence of the native language movement. With the ending of martial law in 1987, the restrictions on "local languages" were quietly lifted, resulting in growing interest in Taiwanese writing during the 1990s. For the first time since the 1950s, Taiwanese language and literature was discussed and debated openly in newspapers and journals. There was also support from the then opposition party, the
Democratic Progressive Party, for writing in the language. From a total of 26 documented orthographies for Taiwanese in 1987 (including defunct systems), there were a further 38 invented from 1987 to 1999, including 30 different romanizations, six adaptations of bopomofo and two
hangul-like systems. Some commentators believe that the Kuomintang, while steering clear of outright banning of the native language movements after the end of martial law, took a "divide and conquer" approach by promoting
Taiwanese Language Phonetic Alphabet (TLPA), an alternative to POJ, which was at the time the choice of the majority within the nativization movement. Native language education has remained a fiercely debated topic in Taiwan into the 21st century and is the subject of much political wrangling. ==Current system==