residential telephone number lookup

[elizaberth]

hi there,

i am wondering whether i can check out a residential telephone number in china, say,shanghai.

Are there such a service in china?

thanks

[mrtoga]

I can't imagine how a Chinese telephone directory would be put together. How many entries for just for Wang in Shanghai for instance?? I have only been in China a few years and already I know a couple of people with the same name. Needless to say I only know a tiny fraction of the 1.3 billion population.

Good question though. Do they exist? I have not seen one in Harbin.....

[smalldog]

I've seen a residential telephone directory for a rural town (镇 zhen). It was over a hundred pages long and there were plenty of duplicate names but no addresses. I suppose it could work in a larger area if addresses were included, but imagine the size of it!

[Josh-J]

Regarding the size it would be, I don't see why it should be overly large. Here telephone directories for the whole county (as far as I know) are delivered to every house in the area. At least, I've got one here in front of me now, and its about 2cm thick, about half of that being classified adverts. So thats about 1cm thickness of phone numbers, printed on A4 paper. Of course, ex-directory numbers aren't included but I would hazard a guess that such numbers are a small minority.

The paper its printed on is extremely thin - the whole thing is 560 pages long.

Oh also, it gives the address of all the people as well.. so you have surname followed by initials, the address and phone number.

Of course, this is an english-language directory, I'm not sure if chinese inherently takes up more space?

[mr.stinky]

i've yet to see a phone directory in km, can't imagine how it could be done. a city of about

4 million, with 400 or so common names.....if they're regularly distributed, that would be

40,000 entries per last name (if everyone has a landline phone). does everybody get a

free copy of the directory, the size of the encyclopedia brittanica? and what about the

equivalent of 'smith?' there could be 150,000 entries for wang, with 25,000 li's.

how would you look up a name? surely it would be in hanzi, seeing as most chinese that

i've met (including some uni instructors) can't spell pinyin. i assume there would be a

radical look-up table included? is there a 'spelling order' for chinese characters, or is

the dictionary order always based on the pinyin pronunciation?

hard to compare with a western 'county' directory. my county in texas had a population of

1100, land area 2500 square miles. phone directory was 7 pages of notepad sized A6.

The entire region was included, something like 14 counties, pop 15k, area maybe 15000

square miles. phone directory, including adverts was about 1cm thick.

[ameliasj]

Actually, for privacy, there's no such a phone directory containing personal phone number in China. You could find a yellow page containing mainly all the companies, stores and other public places telephones but no private one.

If you do want to search for someone, all you could do is go to the police with your identification card or something like that, to ask them search the person's number by their computer.

[Josh-J]

hard to compare with a western 'county' directory.

I suppose thats true, the last census of this county gives a population of around 620,000 people. So thats almost 8 times less than 4 million

[skylee]

IIRC, we used to have paper telephone directories in HK. Back then HK should be a city of 5 to 6 million people. There were several types of telephone directories, all printed in both Chinese and English versions, including residential lines (3 volumes for Hong Kong, Kowloon and New Territories, respectively) commercial lines and the yellow page. All printed in very thin paper. Chinese names were first sorted by radicals then number of strokes.

But that was before the internet and mobile phones ...