Beijing means "northern capital", following the common East Asian tradition of explicitly naming capitals as such. Similarly named cities include Nanjing (南京), China, meaning "southern capital"; Tokyo, Japan, and Đông Kinh, now Hanoi, Vietnam, both meaning "eastern capital" (東京); as well as Kyoto (京都), Japan, and Gyeongseong (京城; now Seoul), Korea, both meaning "capital city".
The Peking spellingPeking is the name of the city according to Chinese Postal Map Romanisation, and the traditional customary name for Beijing in English. It, together with its variants, is still used in many languages. The name originated with missionaries four hundred years ago and corresponds to an older pronunciation predating a sound change in Mandarin from [kʲ] to [tɕ] ([tɕ] is represented in pinyin as j, as in Beijing.) The pronunciation "Peking" is also closer to the Fujianese dialect of Amoy or Min Nan spoken in the city of Xiamen, a port where European (Portuguese) traders first landed in the 16th century, while "Beijing" more closely approximates the Mandarin pronunciation of the city's name.
Other historical names of BeijingThe city has been renamed several times. During the Jin Dynasty, it was known as Zhongdu (中都), then later, under the Mongol Yuan Dynasty, as Dadu (大都) to the Chinese and Daidu to Mongols (also recorded as Cambuluc by Marco Polo). Twice in the city's history, the name was changed from Beijing (Peking) to Beiping (Peiping) (北平; Pinyin: Běipíng; Wade-Giles: Pei-p'ing), literally "northern peace", first under the Hongwu Emperor of the Ming Dynasty, and again in 1928 by the Kuomintang (KMT) government of the Republic of China.[6] On each occasion, the character meaning "capital" (京) was deleted to reflect the fact the national capital had moved to Nanjing, in Jiangsu Province. Each renaming was reverted, the first under the Yongle Emperor of the Ming Dynasty, who moved the capital from Nanjing back to Beijing, and again in 1949, when the Communist Party of China restored Beijing as its capital after the founding of the People's Republic of China. The abbreviation of the municipality is its second character (京) and is used on licence plates, among other things.
Yanjing (Chinese: 燕京; pinyin: Yānjīng; Wade–Giles: Yen-ching) is and has been another popular informal name for Beijing, a reference to the ancient State of Yan that existed here during the Zhou Dynasty. This name is reflected in the locally brewed Yanjing Beer as well as Yenching University, an institution of higher learning that was merged into Peking University.
