Quian Xuesen is also referred to as Qian Xuesheng or Tsuen Hsu Shen in books and essays.
For this reason, it is very difficult to look up the index of a book if one wants to look for him or any Chinese name unless one has the complete versions of a person’s name.
Why the variety in names?
The reason is that Chinese is a graph or character-based writing. For that reason, it is necessary to transliterate Chinese to the Roman/Latin alphabet for non-Chinese-speaking readers.
The term ‘Romanization of Chinese’ refers to the use of the Latin alphabet to transliterate Chinese.
Unfortunately, there are many systems of romanisation used over the centuries, beginning with China’s engagement with the Italian priest Matteo Ricci and then with the rest of the Westerners like the British and Americans.
The dominant international standard used since about 1982 is Hanyu Pinyin, invented by a group of Chinese linguists, led by Zhou Youguang, in the 1950s.
Other well-known systems include the earlier Wade-Giles (Beijing Mandarin) and Yale romanization (Beijing Mandarin and Cantonese).
Wade-Giles is the first system to be widely accepted. It is an 1859 system by the British diplomat Thomas Wade, revised and improved by Herbert Giles into the (1892) Wade-Giles (威翟式拼音) system.
The innovation of the Wade-Giles system is that it also indicates tones. This is critical, as the four tones in which Chinese syllables are pronounced are usually not noted in romanisation.
The Yale romanization system was created at Yale University during World War II to facilitate communication between American military personnel and their Chinese counterparts.
The Yale system taught Mandarin using spoken, colloquial Chinese patterns.
Both the Wade-Giles and the Yale system of Mandarin have since been superseded by the Chinese Hanyu Pinyin system.
[See China’s Imperial Past by Charles O. Hucker, 1975 edition, p. 436, an excellent introduction to Chinese history].
