Foochow Romanized

Foochow Romanized Hók-ciŭ-uâ Lò̤-mā-cê, Bàng-uâ-cê
Bible in Foochow Romanized (Exodus), published by British and Foreign Bible Society in 1908
Type	Latin alphabet (modified)
Languages	Fuzhou dialect of the Eastern Min language
Creator	Moses Clark White, Robert Samuel Maclay, Caleb Cook Baldwin, Robert Stewart
Time period	late 19th century - ?
Child systems	Hinghwa Romanized, Kienning Colloquial Romanized

Foochow Romanized, also known as Bàng-uâ-cê (BUC for short; Chinese: 平話字) or Hók-ciŭ-uâ Lò̤-mā-cê (Chinese: 福州話羅馬字), is a Latin alphabet for the Fuzhou dialect of Eastern Min adopted in the middle of 19th century by Western missionaries. It had varied at different times, and became standardized in the 1890s. Foochow Romanized was mainly used inside of Church circles, and was taught in some Mission Schools in Fuzhou. But unlike its counterpart Pe̍h-ōe-jī for Hokkien, even in its prime days Foochow Romanized was by no means universally understood by Christians.

After Fuzhou became one of the five Chinese treaty ports opened by the Treaty of Nanjing at the end of First Opium War (from 1839 to 1842), many Western missionaries arrived in the city. Faced with widespread illiteracy, they developed Latin alphabets for Fuzhou dialect.

The first attempt in romanizing Fuzhou dialect was made by the American Methodist M. C. White, who borrowed a system of orthography known as the System of Sir William Jones. In this system, 14 initials were designed exactly according to their voicing and aspiration. ⟨p⟩, ⟨t⟩, ⟨k⟩ and ⟨ch⟩ stand for [p], [t], [k] and [ts]; while the Greek spiritus lenis ⟨᾿⟩ were affixed to the above initials to represent their aspirated counterparts. Besides the default five vowels of Latin alphabet, four diacritic-marked letters ⟨è⟩, ⟨ë⟩, ⟨ò⟩ and ⟨ü⟩ were also introduced, representing [ɛ], [ø], [ɔ], and [y], respectively. This system is described at length in White's linguistic work .