When was beijing peking

In fact, he was British ambassador to China for a while, and a Professor of Chinese at Cambridge, so I imagine he never swore at all in any case.

I've been doing a lot of research around European newspaper websites at the moment, in preparation for my presentation in Amsterdam at the Euro IA Summit , and I couldn't help noticing that, actually, the Chinese Postal Map 'Peking' way of spelling Beijing seems to have persisted in most major European languages outside of English.

By Martin Belam on 22 August Read other recent posts about: Olympics. They seem to have fallen in line since, but for a very long time The Independent persisted with 'Peking' on the grounds that the Chinese government wanted the Western media to call their capital Beijing, and the paper wasn't minded to do as it was told by the Chinese government. I only heard of Beijing when I moved to North America. If I had heard the word beijing I would probably think it is something that is served with a side of rice.

So, when exactly did Peking become Beijing? In reality, however, the West has been using the old spelling long after it had already been replaced inChina. It has only been since the s thatChinastarted to enforce its official name on all flights, sea routes and official documents.

This is why the namePekingis still echoing in our minds and people continue to use it even today. Needless to say, it is easier to pronounce thanBeijing. Both the old and new spelling are approximations of the Chinese sound, pronounced similar to "pay-cheeng. Remember the movie Chunking Express? Chunking in mainlandChina where it is located anyway is written asChongqing-- it is the same thing under a different spelling system. A number of names did not change their spelling, however.

Shanghaihas always beenShanghaibut this is because both the old and new spelling systems transcribed in the same way. The change from Peking toBeijingis perhaps the most dramatic because, for starters, it is the capital ofChinaand thus one of the best known Chinese cities.

As well, the change is relatively large in scale. Thus the capital became "Beijing" rather than Peking, "Canton" became Guang zhou, etc.

The new spellings are now used by academics, journalists and politicians in most of the Englishspeaking world. No one, for example, now uses the old English names of Teintsin and Sianfu for the Chinese cities of Tianjin and Xi'an. Only in Britain is there still any lingering debate and it centres on one name - Peking.

This was what the English called the city when they were masters of the China Sea. It has all sorts of historical resonances. ProPekingers ask, why change it?

Some cite practical reasons. The highly-respected China scholar, Jonathan Spence, continues to use Peking as a word "long familiar in the west and difficult to recognise in pinyin" The Search for Modern China, For other English-speakers the ones who might argue their case in a letter to the editor signed "Outraged, Kingstown" the adoption of Beijing is rejected contemptuously, and wrongly, as a craven case of kow-towing to China's communist rulers.

Some other languages have not followed the new spellings, but for entirely different reasons. Russians for example continue to refer to Pekin, but then in Russian a black person is still a negr, the Russians never having seen any reason to debate issues of political or linguistic correctness in the English-speaking world. Certainly it is a loaded term to the Chinese, who take offence when they hear anyone in the English "establishment" using the word.

Recently, the London Times correspondent in China, James Pringle, was summoned to the Foreign Ministry and told co-operation would be withdrawn if the Times did not stop using Peking. It now uses Beijing. Other British newspapers have long since fallen into line, though the London Independent remains a Peking holdout. The clincher for the Times was probably its own Atlas, the bible of world nomenclature, which some time ago switched to Beijing. The controversy can cause confusion to the unwary.

The Times man told of meeting an American businessman on a train in China.