The ninth issue of Xin Tang is now available here on Pinyin.info. The journal, which was published in the 1980s, is in and about romanization. By this point in its publication most everything in it was written in Hanyu Pinyin (as opposed to Gwoyeu Romatzyh or another system). Xin Tang is interesting not just as a forum in which one can read original content in Pinyin. It’s also important for the history of Pinyin itself. Over the course of its nearly decade-long run, one can see its authors (including many top people in romanization) working out Pinyin as a real script.

Xin Tang no. 9 (December 1988)

Here’s an English version of the table of contents. Note that the articles themselves are, for the most part, in Mandarin.

• Articles
  • Wang Jun: Perfecting Hanyu Pinyin and Broadening Its Use
  • Wang Naican: “Established at Age Thirty,but the Task is Heavy and the Way is Long”
  • Apollo Wu: China Needs an Alphabetical Script
  • Zhang Liqing: Must Written Chinese Have Tones Indicated?
  • Qian Yuzhi, Li Shuo: Research on Alphabetical Spelling of Tones
  • Victor H. Mair: A Letter Concerning the Compilation of an Alphabetically Ordered Dictionary
• Pinyin and Computers
  • Guo Xiao, Chen Zhiqiang: Welcoming the Era of the Popularization of Word Processors- An Interview with Professor Zhou Youguang
  • Yin Binyong: Pinyin Computers Force People to Change Their Writing Styles
  • Wu Yue: Using a Computerized Chinese Typewriter to Help in Creative Writing
  • Jin Huishu: Few Special Spellings Are Required for “Automatic Conversion from Pinyin to Chinese Characters”
  • It Is Not Difficult to Master Pinyin Computers (report from Henan)
  • International Computer Conference Held in Toronto in 1988 (report from Canada)
• Children’s Corner: Literature
  • Little Xie’s Long Trunk,
  • The Adventures of Chunmei and Mimi (illustrated serial by Rui Luobin),
  • Encounter beneath the Lighthouse,
  • The Oriole and the Eagle (Liqing),
  • The Fig Tree (Xu Hongxin)
• Classical Chinese Selection
  • A Passage from the Zhuangzi
• Learning Mandarin
  • Lesson 1: in Peking
• Letters from Readers
• News
  • Commemoration of the Thirtieth Anniversary of the Promulgation of the Scheme for Hanyu Pinyin Official
  • Promulgation of the Basic Orthographical Rules for Hanyu Pinyin
  • The Bilingual Pedagogical Experiment of Zhang Zhigong
  • Hangzhou Experiments with a New Pedagogy Using Pinyin
  • Announcement of a New Book: “Chinese Romanization: Pronunciation and Orthography”