Yesterday, I talked about a phone incident when I was in Peking, China. The time was 1972 and the city was called Peking. Today, it is known as Beijing. Now cities and countries change their names all the time — for a lot of different reasons. But since I mentioned it, I thought it might be interesting to at least one of this forum’s faithful readers to know why it was changed….
When I was growing up and when I first visited mainland China, the capital city of the country was Peking. I’m not exactly sure of the precise day it happened, but Peking became Beijing sometime after 1979. The name wasn’t actually “changed” — it just became Beijing when the Pinyin method of conveying Mandarin in the Roman alphabet was adopted as an international standard. It took a while for the Pinyin system to become an international standard. It was developed by the People’s Republic of China government in the 1950s and (eventually) would replace a system known as the Chinese Postal Map Romanization. That system was adapted from an earlier system — the Wade-Giles system.
The Wade-Giles system was invented in the 18th century by Thomas Francis Wade. As you might have guessed, Thomas was British and fought in the Opium Wars in China. He learned Mandarin and was able to come up with a system that allowed Chinese words, made up of dashed funny symbols to be written using “proper” letters.
If you’re interested, he’s a pretty interesting guy to read about… he was a Professor of Chinese at Cambridge and the British ambassador to China for a while. Anyhow, as Paul Harvey used to say, now you know the “rest of the story.”
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