China Address Standard

A Chinese address is written from the largest area to the smallest: the province, then the city, the district, the street with its number, and finally the building, the floor and the room. The same address written in English or in pinyin runs the other way, from the room up to the province. Business partner data holds both orders, often in the same file, and sometimes mixes them in one record. What breaks integrations is reading the components by their position rather than by the words that mark them, and deciding which of the several "cities" in a Chinese address is the city.

This article describes the Chinese address format, how CDQ represents it in the CDQ address model, how the province and the postcode are handled, and which reference data CDQ maintains for China. It is the reference for anyone mapping Chinese business partner data into CDQ, or consuming curated Chinese addresses from CDQ.

In this article, you will understand:

• Why the same Chinese address is written in two opposite orders
• Which administrative levels appear on an address, and which of them is the city
• How the street, the number, the building, the floor and the room are written
• What the six-digit postcode encodes
• How each element maps to a concept in the CDQ address model, and which SAP field it reaches
• Which country code applies to Hong Kong and Macao
• Which reference data CDQ maintains for China, and where it is incomplete

Available in:

• CDQ Wiki: business partner metadata for China: browse the published Chinese metadata

The People's Republic of China has a deep administrative hierarchy. Not every level is written on an address.

A county-level city is a city in its own right, and businesses in it usually name it as their city. It still belongs to a prefecture-level city: 昆山市 Kunshan is part of 苏州市 Suzhou.

The same address in the three forms found in business data. In Chinese, from the largest area to the smallest:

北京市海淀区知春路12号

In English and in pinyin, as China Post gives it in the UPU addressing sample, from the smallest to the largest, with the postcode in front of the province:

No.12 Zhichun Road
Haidian District
100191 BEIJING
P.R. CHINA

Zhichun Lu 12 Hao
Haidian Qu
100191 BEIJING
P.R. CHINA

A rural address names the town, the county and the prefecture-level city, which the urban example does not need:

No.10 Tuanjie Road, Xinyang Village, Danyang Town
Lianjiang County, Fuzhou City
350503 FUJIAN
P.R. CHINA

In Beijing the province-level line is the municipality, so BEIJING stands for both the region and the city.

A direction is part of the street name, not a separate element: 前进中路 is Qianjin Middle Road and 中山东路 is Zhongshan East Road. In Chinese the building, unit, floor and room follow the street number without separators; in English they move to a line of their own above the street, as in Room 1001, Floor 10, Building 3.

The postcode has six digits. The first two identify the province-level division, the third the postal zone within it, the fourth the post office, and the last two the delivery area. One postcode covers many addresses; it does not identify a building.

Hong Kong and Macao have their own ISO 3166-1 codes, HK and MO, their own postal administrations, and their own address formats. ISO 3166-2 also lists them as regions of China, CN-HK and CN-MO, which is why business data sometimes holds them under CN.

This standard uses HK and MO. An address supplied as CN with the region Hong Kong or Macao is accepted as input, and identifies the same place. Hong Kong uses no postcode. Addresses in Taiwan are outside the scope of this article.

The city is the prefecture-level city. An address in Kunshan names 苏州市 Suzhou and 昆山市 Kunshan. Both are cities; this standard keeps the prefecture-level city as the city and the county-level city as the district (see below). Storing whichever comes first, or concatenating them, produces values that no comparison will match.

Beijing as region and as city is correct. For a municipality, the same name in the region and in the city is not a duplicate to clean up.

Shaanxi and Shanxi are two provinces. 陕西 Shaanxi (CN-SN) and 山西 Shanxi (CN-SX) differ only in the tone of the first syllable, which pinyin without tone marks cannot show. The double a in Shaanxi is the official spelling that tells them apart. A source that writes both as Shanxi has merged two provinces.

ISO changed the region codes in 2017. The numeric codes were replaced by letters: CN-11 became CN-BJ, CN-31 became CN-SH, CN-32 became CN-JS, CN-44 became CN-GD, and so on for every province. Data and mappings built before 2017 may still hold the numeric codes.

A postcode is text, not a number. Inner Mongolia postcodes start with 0, as in 027212. Stored as a number, the code loses its first digit.

Hong Kong has no postcode. A value such as 999077 in a Hong Kong address is an internal China Post code for international mail, not a Hong Kong postcode.

The CDQ address model has two parallel hierarchies. Administrative areas represent the political containers, typed REGION and COUNTY. Localities represent the places themselves, typed CITY, DISTRICT, QUARTER or BLOCK. Streets are held as thoroughfares with the number in its own field, and buildings, units, floors and rooms as typed premises.

China maps as follows:

The prefecture-level city is the city in this standard, and for a municipality the city is the municipality: Beijing is both the region and the city. A district, a county or a county-level city goes to the district, so an address in Kunshan has the city Suzhou and the district Kunshan. The township and the village go to locality levels 3 and 4, below the district, and a development zone is held as an industrial zone next to the street. None of the three has an SAP field of its own in this standard. China does not use the SAP house number supplement, HOUSE_NUM2, which CDQ fills only for the Iberian and Latin American convention.

The city, the district and the street are kept in the script in which they arrive. A record in Chinese characters is not romanised, and a record in pinyin or English is not converted to Chinese characters.

CDQ standardises the province against reference data and writes back the canonical name and the ISO 3166-2 code. The reference data holds each province-level division in Chinese characters, with its suffix, and in pinyin and English, so 江苏省, Jiangsu and Jiangsu Sheng identify the same record.

The province is not derived from the postcode, and the postcode is not checked against the province. Where an address provider is enabled, it can complete and correct both.

CDQ delivers the province with its ISO 3166-2 code. An SAP system does not validate against ISO: it validates the region field against its own region key table, T005S, which is part of a customer's configuration.

The region key is customer-specific configuration, so this standard does not define one: a T005S is specific to a customer and to a client, and no single value would be correct everywhere. What this standard fixes is the ISO 3166-2 code. The mapping from it to the key your system expects is yours to maintain.

For China, do not assume that your key equals the two letters of the ISO code. A mapping built from ISO before 2017 holds the numeric codes (CN-11 for Beijing, CN-44 for Guangdong), which ISO replaced with letters that year. Confirm that your table covers all 31 mainland province-level divisions.

Room 1001, Floor 10, Building 3, No.12 Zhichun Road, Haidian District, 100191 Beijing, adapted from the China Post sample, in the CDQ address model:

In the SAP fields, 12 is the house number, 3 the building, 10 the floor and 1001 the room number; Zhichun Road is the street, Haidian District the district, and Beijing both the city and the region.

34 entries, the full ISO 3166-2 list: 23 provinces, 5 autonomous regions, 4 municipalities and the 2 special administrative regions. Each carries its ISO code, its name in Chinese characters with its suffix, and its name in pinyin and English.

The pinyin forms are published with and without the suffix and with the syllables written apart, for example Jiangsu, Jiangsu Sheng and Jiang Su Sheng.

A small vocabulary: 大厦 and 办公楼 for a building, 楼 for a floor, 室 for a room, and English street and building words such as Road (RD), Street (ST) and Avenue (AVE).

Six digits.

These are the gaps worth knowing about before designing an integration.

A Chinese address names the province, the city, the district, the street with its number, and then the building, the floor and the room. Chinese writes it from the largest area to the smallest; English and pinyin write it the other way, with the six-digit postcode in front of the province. Each level carries a marker word, and the marker, not the position, identifies it. Several levels end in 市, and this standard keeps the prefecture-level city as the city. Hong Kong and Macao have their own country codes.

CDQ places the province in administrative area level 1, the prefecture-level city in locality level 1, the district, county or county-level city in locality level 2, and the township and the village in levels 3 and 4. The street, the number, the building, the unit, the floor and the room are separate fields, and the city, the district and the street stay in the script they arrive in. The province is standardised from its Chinese, pinyin or English name. The SAP region key is customer configuration.

The 34 province-level divisions are maintained as CDQ reference data. The Chinese street and premise vocabulary, the splitting of a full address in simplified characters, and the conversion of Hong Kong and Macao are where the current coverage is weakest.

• Business partner metadata for China
• Japan Address Standard
• Korea Address Standard

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