The Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation (讀音統一會 Pinyin: Dúyīn Tǒngyī Huì) was established in the Republic of China from 1912 to 1913 to select ancillary phonetic symbols for Mandarin, (Zhuyin was the product) and set the standard Guoyu pronunciation of basic Chinese characters.
As a historian, Xu Xusheng authored the 1943 book, Zhong-guogushi tie chuanshiio shidai ("The legendary times in early Chinese history") where he comments that the name of Five Emperors was not mentioned until the Warring States era and cannot be found in the Zuo Zhuan, Guoyu, Lunyu, Mozi or Mengzi.
Guoyu | Guoyu (book) |
The first large-scale project to promote spoken language unification was in 1936: Wang Li's 4 volume Mandarin Phonetic System (MPS) entry, Guoyu Cidian (Kuo-yu Tz'u-tien).
For example, in the first chapter, "Annals of the Five Emperors," he writes, "I have read the Spring and Autumn Annals and the Guoyu." In his 13th chapter, "Genealogical Table of the Three Ages," Sima Qian writes, "I have read all the genealogies of the kings (dieji 谍记) that exist since the time of the Yellow Emperor."