A Chinese address is not a string you can transliterate
The first time a taxi driver handed my phone back to me, confused, I assumed the problem was my pronunciation. It was not. The problem was that I had given him a name, and he needed a location.
That distinction sounds obvious written down. It is not obvious at 11pm outside a train station, holding a booking that says "Near West Lake, Hangzhou".
Three ways it goes wrong
1. The address exists in two scripts and only one is useful. "No. 8 Baoshi Road" means nothing to a driver. 宝石路8号 means everything. The Latin version is a label for you, not an instruction for him.
2. The place has a name that is not an address. Guesthouses, restaurants, small hotels — known locally by a name, and the name is not where they are. You cannot navigate to a name.
3. Your phone is the only map, and you are handing it to a stranger. Underestimated, this one. Passing a phone back and forth through a language barrier is slow, and on a motorway it is not safe.
What I wanted and could not find
A piece of paper. Something to hand over, that says the destination in large characters, has a map behind a QR code, and needs no English from the reader.
Every "translate your address" tool produced a text block — fine for a form, useless for a windscreen. So I built the thing I wanted: type a destination, get a card.
The constraints that actually mattered
Characters first. The largest element is the Chinese address, sized to be read from the back seat. Pinyin underneath, because drivers sometimes read it aloud to a colleague.
A QR code, not a map image. A static map is a picture of a route; a QR opens a live one in Amap, which is what drivers here use. It also survives being printed badly.
No account, no server round trip on render. You can generate a card for a hotel you have not booked, print it on hotel wifi, and it still works in the car.
The address has to be a real address. This is the easy thing to get wrong: let people type anything, generate a confident-looking card with the wrong characters on it. The card is only as good as the address in it, so the source of the address matters more than the typography.
What I would tell anyone building for a country they do not read
Check the output against someone who reads it natively, not against a translation API. A transliteration can be perfectly correct and still useless, because it is not the form the reader expects.
The generator is at sinostay.com/tools/taxi-card — free, no account. If you are heading to China with a hotel booked, generate one and put it in your wallet. A minute of work removes one of the two or three genuinely stressful moments of the trip.
The address data behind it comes from an index I maintain: 9,720 hotels that state they accept foreign guests, each carrying its Chinese address, because that field turned out to be the one that matters.
All of it lives on sinostay, alongside the visa, payment and transport answers that took me longer to find than they should have.
