How Peking Is Different From Beijing

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How Peking Is Different From Beijing


The city of Běijīng 北京 in northern China has been China's capital for centuries.

However the name has not been consistently transcribed into Roman letters. "Peking" is the older English spelling (comparable to Pékin in French or Pekín in Spanish).

The letter K before an I was oftden used for a J-like sound that was quite far forward in the mouth —almost a DZ sound. A contrasting J-like sound was then spelled CH. The distinction between the two sounds was probably never universal in Mandarin, and remains in very few Mandarin dialects today.

The establishment of a standard dialect of Mandarin as China's official language in 1929 did not recognize the "KI-CHI" distinction, and western spellings observing it continued only in France, so far as I know.

Language reform in the 1950s established an official Romanized spelling system for use in transcribing Chinese words in other languages.

In the new (and current) system the old CHI and KI were replaced with JI, and, Běijīng was spelled "Beijing," and not "Peking" any more. (Note to talking heads: The sound of the J is like the J in English "jingle'; it is NOT like a French J.)

The rationalized new spelling system was generally ignored outside of China until the mid-1970s, when the Chinese government refused to continue transcribing Chinese words in official press releases into multiple other systems. Foreign reporters, who rarely knew Chinese, were unable to make their own transcriptions, and foreign news agencies like AFP, Reuters, UPI, and AP, also perhaps unable to handle their own transcriptions, could only use the official spellings (although they always left off the tone marks). So the city of Běijīng is now spelled Beijing in English, even though the obsolete spelling "Peking" continues in a few set phrases, like "Peking Man" and "Peking Union Medical College."

On the heels of this change came a general move to displace nearly all of the older English names for Chinese cities with their newly officialized versions: Shantung became Shandong. Canton became Guangzhou. Amoy became Xiamen. And so on.

One additional point: The official capital was briefly moved to Nánjīng 南京 for a couple decades under the Nationalist government in the early XXth century, and the name of Beijing was changed to Běipíng 北平 because "jīng" means "capital," and the government was keen to stress that the city was not the capital any more. During that period the name Běipíng was usually spelled "Peping," "Peiping," or "Pehping" in English.


 

 

Content Revised: 2016-04-10
Software Last Modified: 2022-05-30
Search term: "peking" (Debugging)