Posted by Andrew Craig-Bennett on March 15, 2005 at 22:25:48 from 195.93.21.2 user ACB.
In Reply to: Re: Renaming posted by Robert Dilley on March 15, 2005 at 19:38:04:
Please don't blame the Chinese for something they have not done; Beijing is not a renaming of Peking!
The city was renamed in the 1930's by the Japanese, as Beiping, but it got its own name back in 1949
If I could write the name here on Tarboard I would prove it, but anyway it is Bei (North) Jing (Capital), cf Nanjing (South Capital) and Chunking (West Capital). Dongjing (East Capital) is Tokyo, but you need to see it written to understand that joke - Japanese uses "kanji" (Chinese ideograms) for some purposes and a phonetic script for others, and Tokyo is indeed the Eastern Capital of Japan. (Beiping = "North Peace", incidentally - very much a conqueror's re-naming.)
What happened is that the Wade-Giles transliteration transliterated into French, whereas Pinyin transliterates into Russian (originally into Cyrillic script). Say "Pekin" in French and it sounds pretty much like "Beijing".