Postal romanization was a system of transliterating place names in China developed by postal authorities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For many cities, the corresponding postal romanization was the most common English-language form of the city's name from the 1890s until the 1980s, when postal romanization was replaced by pinyin, but the system remained in place in Taiwan until 2002.

In 1892, Herbert Giles created a romanization system called the Nanking syllabary. The Imperial Maritime Customs Post Office would cancel postage with a stamp that gave the city of origin in Latin letters, often romanized using Giles's system. In 1896, the Customs Post was combined with other postal services and renamed the Chinese Imperial Post. As a national agency, the Imperial Post was an authority on Chinese place names.

When the Wade–Giles system became widespread, some argued that the post office should adopt it. This idea was rejected at a conference held in 1906 in Shanghai. Instead, the conference formally adopted Nanking syllabary. This decision allowed the post office to continue to use various romanizations that it had already selected. Wade–Giles romanization is based on the Beijing dialect, a pronunciation standard since the 1850s. The use of Nanking syllabary did not suggest that the post office considered Nanjing pronunciation to be standard. Rather, it was an attempt to accommodate a variety of Mandarin pronunciations with a single romanization system.

The spelling "Amoy" is based on pronunciation of Xiamen in the neighboring Zhangzhou dialect of Hokkien 廈門; Ēe-mûi, which historically contributed to the formation of the local Amoy dialect of Hokkien in Xiamen. "Peking" is carried over from the d'Anville map which also came from older texts, such as Italian Jesuit Martino Martini's De Bello Tartarico Historia (1654) and Novus Atlas Sinensis (1655). In Nanking syllabary, the city is Pehking. The irregular oo in "Soochow" is to distinguish this city from Xuzhou in northern Jiangsu. The other postal romanizations are based on "Southern Mandarin", the historical court dialect based on the Nanjing dialect, which used to be the imperial lingua franca of the late Ming and early Qing court. Pinyin spellings are based on Standard Chinese, a form based on the Beijing dialect that is taught in the Chinese education system.

After the Kuomintang (KMT) party came to power in 1927, the capital was moved from Peking ('northern capital') to Nanking ('southern capital'). Peking was renamed to "Peiping" ('northern peace').

The Customs Post, China's first government-run post office, opened to the public and began issuing postage stamps in 1878. This office was part of the Imperial Maritime Customs Service, led by Irishman Robert Hart. By 1882, the Customs Post had offices in twelve Treaty Ports: Shanghai, Amoy, Chefoo, Chinkiang, Chungking, Foochow, Hankow, Ichang, Kewkiang, Nanking, Weihaiwei, and Wuhu. Local offices had postmarking equipment so mail was marked with a romanized form of the city's name. In addition, there were companies that provided local postal service in each of these cities.

A Chinese-English Dictionary by Herbert Giles, published in 1892, popularized the Wade–Giles method of transliteration. This system had been created by Thomas Francis Wade in 1867. It is based on pronunciation in Beijing. Giles's dictionary also gives pronunciation in the dialects of various other cities, allowing the reader to create locally based transliterations. From January 1893 to September 1896, local postal services issued postage stamps that featured the romanized name of the city they served using local pronunciation.

An imperial edict issued in 1896 designated the Customs Post a national postal service and renamed it the Chinese Imperial Post. The local post offices in the Treaty Ports were incorporated into the new service. The Customs Post was smaller than other postal services in China, such as the British. As the Imperial Post, it grew rapidly and soon became the dominant player in the market.