Key takeaways
- Chinese-script order moves from province and city toward room and recipient
- Romanized international order commonly starts with recipient and specific premises
- Store the six-digit postcode as text
- Romanization, translation, and postal validation are separate
Authorship and review
Read our editorial and review principles- Written by
- Random Address Generator Editorial Team
- Reviewed by
- International Address Format Review Team
- Latest substantive update
- Reviewed Chinese hierarchy, Romanized international order, and six-digit postcodes against Universal Postal Union reference material.
Broad-to-specific domestic hierarchy
Chinese addresses generally move from province-level region, city, and district toward road, premises, compound, floor, room, and recipient. Direct-administered municipalities can make province and city values appear repeated, so do not require them to be different strings.
Use localized labels and flexible administrative levels instead of compressing every address into City and State.
Romanized international rendering
UPU reference examples put recipient, room and building, road, district, postcode and city, then P.R. CHINA. Build this from structured components; do not reverse a Chinese string. Let users confirm romanized names and places.
Mapping international form fields
Retain the original full address while optionally structuring province, city, district, and detailed lines. Avoid one globally fixed line count.
| Field | Meaning | Test |
|---|---|---|
| address-level1 | Province, autonomous region, or municipality | Allow municipality models |
| address-level2 | City | May repeat level1 in display |
| address-level3 | District or county | Preserve source label or code |
| address-line1 | Road and premises | Support Chinese script |
| address-line2 | Compound, building, floor, room | Allow empty or long |
| postal-code | Six-digit postcode | Store as text |
Encoding, names, and export tests
Unicode must survive browser input, JSON, database storage, CSV export, and PDF fonts. Read exported files back instead of asserting download success only.
Do not force every full name through Western first-name and last-name fields. Preserve fullName and make parsed fields optional.
- Round-trip Chinese script through JSON
- Re-import UTF-8 CSV
- Embed a Chinese-capable PDF font
- Preserve fullName without whitespace assumptions
- Retain postcode leading zeroes
Separate format, transliteration, and existence
A synthetic record can have a correct hierarchy without identifying a real room. Real delivery needs a lawful data source and user confirmation.
Review source, components, and international output together
Do not review only the final English label. Place the original Chinese, parsed province-city-district and detail fields, and user-confirmed Romanized rendering side by side. A reviewer should be able to trace every output back to a source component and see whether a floor, room, or district vanished during reordering.
Pass the same record through mobile input, JSON API, database, CSV, and PDF. Compare Unicode text, postcode length, and line count at each boundary. A CSV may appear correct when first opened but return with a numeric postcode or incorrectly decoded Chinese after import.
Keep transliteration status and postal verification status in different fields. A human-approved Romanized spelling answers how to print a name internationally; it says nothing about whether a premises exists or can receive a parcel.
Record who confirmed the international rendering and when. If a customer later edits only the Romanized building name, the original Chinese address should remain unchanged and the application should not silently rerun every other component through a transliteration service. Test this partial-update path through both the form and API, including concurrent edits, because it is where otherwise separate source and display fields are often accidentally overwritten.
- Review Chinese source, parsed fields, and output side by side
- Allow corrections to names and place romanization
- Round-trip through API, CSV, and PDF
- Store transliteration and postal verification separately
Frequently asked questions
Can I translate a Chinese address by reversing it?
No. Identify recipient, room, road, district, and city components, then render them in international order.
Should a Chinese postcode be numeric?
Store it as text. It is a six-digit identifier, not a value for arithmetic.
Can I keep only the Romanized address?
Retain the Chinese source for local review and use Romanized text as a separate international rendering.