Guāndì: canonical, contested, and the false forms on record
Evidence dossier 094 — Guāndì. Every exhibit catalogued, every ruling stated with its grounds.
At a Glance
- Canonical form: Guāndì
- Original script: 關帝
- Pantheon: Chinese
- Convention: pinyin with tone marks — tones shown, ǖ kept distinct from u
- False forms on record: 1
- Contested forms: none attested
- Series: The Canonical Register, No. 94 of 287
The Evidence
Exhibit 1 — the attestation. The name is attested as 關帝, as Sanguozhi and Chinese folk religion record. On the evidence, it means ""Emperor Guan" — the deified general Guān Yǔ, god of war, loyalty, and righteousness". The canonical transliteration is Guāndì.
Exhibit 2 — the flattened form. The plain form guandi is not false — it is a fallback, and the register is exact about what that means. In systems that cannot carry diacritics (legacy databases, older tooling, parts of the address-bar pipeline) the flattened form is the accepted vehicle, and the rulebook names it explicitly as the final rung of the fallback hierarchy: full restoration first, circumflex where attested, macron-only by the academic standard, an attested variant, and only then plain ASCII.
What the fallback status forbids is promotion: guandi may carry the name where marks are impossible, but it may not represent the name where marks are possible. A fallback is a vehicle, never the primary.
Exhibit 3 — struck from the record: Guandi. Origin: the publisher compromise — older books and hurried websites that print the "English equivalent" as if it were the name itself. Grounds: every substitution here (ā→a, ì→i) is a romanization of convenience, not an attested spelling — it teaches the reader to guess, not to read.
Exhibit 4 — the physical record. The Guān Lín tomb-temple at Luoyang (where Cáo Cāo buried his head with honors) and the Guān Dì Miào at his birthplace in Yuncheng, Shanxi — the largest Guandi complex, repeatedly rebuilt since the Sui — anchor his cult geography. Ming-Qing Guandi temples survive in every southern port city; Yokohama's Kanteibyō (1862) preserves the diaspora form. His statues' iconography — red face, green robe, crescent blade, the beard-bag — is among the most standardized in world religion.
Exhibit 5 — the continuing record. His temples outnumber Confucius' in the Chinese world; his birthday (24th day of the 6th lunar month) is a national observance from Shanxi to Singapore. The "Guān Gōng" of business is the unwritten clause of every contract; his image guards mahjong parlors, restaurants, and police stations alike.
The Convention's Own History
Every tradition in this register has its own scholarly transliteration standard, built by its own specialists over decades or centuries, and the register follows each on its own terms: pinyin with tone marks — tones shown, ǖ kept distinct from u. The principle that unifies them is the one the whole project stands on: a name is evidence, and evidence is not negotiable — not for keyboards, not for convenience, not for anyone.
The Protocol's Position
Can the canonical form live in the address bar? Almost always, yes. IDNA 2008 admits every mark this register defends — the DNS stores them as `xn--` punycode and modern browsers render them natively. The real frictions are practical, not legal: some registrars stock only part of the IDN space, so a theoretically valid name can be temporarily unbuyable; and stacked combinations (an acute riding a macron) remain awkward to type on mobile keyboards even where the protocol accepts them.
The project's answer is a ranked ladder, not a compromise: the full restoration first, then attested fallbacks in descending order of completeness. The ladder's lowest rung, plain ASCII, is a vehicle for legacy systems — sanctioned, but never presented as the scholarly form.
The Verdict
Case closed on Guāndì: canonical, cited, and defended. The keyboard form guandi rides as the sanctioned fallback — and stays in that lane. The register's files remain open: if a source surfaces that changes any line of this entry, the entry changes. Until then, the temple at /sites/guandi/ holds the canonical form.
The docket for this ruling: 1 false form ruled against, Guandi first on the docket; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 6 cited sources — Sanguozhi, Chinese folk religion, Sanguo Yanyi (Romance of the Three Kingdoms).
The Register Continues
The register holds 287 entries like this one — each temple with its own ruling. Read the temple's founding dispatch for the story, its Restoration File for the philology, its Resonance File for the industries, or the whole archive end to end.
Continue the register — previous entry: Gilgameš (read it) · next entry: Guānyīn (read it).
The Canonical Register is written from the same canonical record as the lexicon itself. If a false form is missing from this page, it is because the evidence does not support calling it false — or because we have not seen it yet. Show us, with a citation, and the register will answer.