The automatic recognition of Chinese place names, a special case of the recognition of Chinese special nouns, is an important task in Chinese information processing. The method based on statistical technique can only ensure the recall to some degree, but the precision is relatively low. In this paper, an approach based on transformation is proposed, which can effectively overcome the deficiency caused by statistics. The performance of the approach is evaluated on a real data set, and the precision finally recahes 90.9%,improved by7%.