Amoy was one of the five treaty ports opened to foreign trade after the First Opium War in 1842. For over a century, English-language maps, shipping records, and diplomatic correspondence referred to the city as Amoy. The name entered English through the Zhangzhou dialect of Hokkien, in which the city’s name is pronounced Ē-mûi. The British traders who arrived in the nineteenth century heard the local pronunciation and transcribed it as Amoy.
The city’s name in standard Chinese is Xiàmén. In pinyin, it is Xiamen. The name has been Xiamen in all official contexts since 1979, when China adopted pinyin as the international standard for romanizing Chinese place names. Every map published after 1979 uses Xiamen. Every airline ticket, every shipping manifest, every news report.
Except in English. Amoy survives in the names of dishes—Amoy noodles, Amoy rice—and in the historical memory of the treaty port era. It survives in the word Amoy itself, which English speakers sometimes encounter without knowing it refers to Xiamen. The two names for the same city coexist in English without acknowledging each other.
This is the placename version of the broken bridge. A reader in London sees Amoy in a nineteenth-century text and Xiamen in a modern article, and has no way to know they are the same place. The language has built a wall between the present and the past of a single city.
Xiamen is not difficult for English speakers. The X- is pronounced roughly sh-. The rest is phonetic. The spelling is the international standard.
Our Recommendation: Xiamen. A city should have one name in every language.