Letters | How Beijing Winter Olympics mascot Bing Dwen Dwen got its romanised name

The Chinese Olympic Committee was right to ditch pinyin in favour of a more obscure romanisation system, the Gwoyeu Romatzyh, to make it easier for foreigners to pronounce the name

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Japanese figure skater Yuzuru Hanyu hugs Beijing Winter Olympic mascot Bing Dwen Dwen during the finale of the exhibition gala at the Beijing Winter Olympics on February 20. Photo: Kyodo

Published: 2:30pm, 23 Feb 2022

Bing Dwen Dwen, the Beijing Winter Olympics’ mascot, a cute and rotund panda wearing a full-body “shell” made out of ice, is massively popular in China. Have you ever wondered why it is called Bing Dwen Dwen?

According to the Chinese Olympic Committee, in Mandarin bing has several meanings, though the most common is “ice”. The character also symbolises purity and strength, while dwen dwen means “robust and lively”, and also represents children, the next generation of Olympic winners.

Bing Dwen Dwen is written as Bīng Dūndūn in pinyin, the most widely used romanisation system for proper names in Chinese-English translation. So why wasn’t the mascot named Bing Dundun in English?

To read Bing Dundun correctly, you would have to be familiar with the pinyin system, or the resulting pronunciation would be a far cry from the Chinese pronunciation. Moreover, “dun” is a word in English meaning “to make repeated and insistent demands”, especially for the payment of a debt. It also means “a greyish-brown colour”. Both meanings do not connote showing goodwill.

So, the Chinese Olympic Committee decided to romanise the name in an entirely new way. Instead of using Wade-Giles, postal romanisation or Yale romanisation, Bing Dwen Dwen is written in Gwoyeu Romatzyh, a romanisation system developed in the 1920s by a group of scholars and linguists including Yuan Ren Chao and Lin Yutang. While never popular, vestiges of Gwoyeu Romatzyh may be seen today, such as in the use of “shaan” in Shaanxi to distinguish that place name from Shanxi, both written in pinyin as Shanxi.

There are some immediate advantages to Gwoyeu Romatzyh. The biggest is that the tone has been incorporated into the spelling of each syllable. For example, the four tones of pinyin’s bing are “bing”, “byng”, “biing” and “binq” in Gwoyeu Romatzyh. The complexity of the tonal system also explains why it never became very popular.