No, today is not the birthday of the founding of Beijing. That happened too far back in history to be able to pinpoint a date. Recorded history goes back around 4000 years and Peking Man dates back more than 200,000 years.
So why wish “Beijing” a “Happy Birthday?”
Well, because it was 36 years ago that the Chinese government decreed that henceforth all Chinese words written in English should use the Pinyin Romanization system instead of the Wade-Giles or Yale systems.
Peking became Beijing.
Canton became Guangzhou.
Mao Tse-tung became Mao Ze-dong.
Chou En-lai became Zhou En-lai.
36 years ago today, the Wall Street Journal published an article announcing and explaining these changes to its confused readers. Here’s how journalist Barry Kramer reported it:
“Foreigners reading about China in their own language may soon be scratching their heads over references to Chinese personalities such as Mao Ze-dong and Jiang Qing, or places such as Zhongqing and Beijing. Beijing’s State Council has taken another step toward simplification of China’s cumbersome written language by ordering that all publications printed in China in English, French, German, Spanish, and other Roman-alphabet languages use only a standard phonetic transliteration system, called Pinyin, to spell names and places.”
You can read the entire Wall Street Journal article on the Today in WSJ History page here.
I wrote about the difference between Peking and Beijing (spelling, of course) in post back in 2010, explaining that the characters didn’t change, only the approved romanization of the characters:
The more complicated (and accurate) response is that in Chinese it didn’t really change. Before the 1970’s the name of the city in characters was 北京, and those characters are still the name of the city today. What changed in the 1970’s was the official pronunciation of those two characters.
The character 北 means ‘north’ or ‘northern.’ The character 京 means capital, so the two characters together mean ‘northern capital.’ The problem lies in the pronunciation of those two characters. In the dialect of northern China (around Beijing) they are pronounced bei and jing. In Cantonese (the dialect of Guangdong Province and Hong Kong) they are pronounced pe and king. Since written Chinese is ideographic, two people who speak different dialects can look at one character and both will know what means, even though they would pronounce them differently. This is the case with Beijing.
So as I said at the beginning, Happy Birthday “Beijing!”
Related Posts:
Imagine Learning Chinese without Pinyin
What ever happened to ‘Peping’?
The Nationalist changed the name to Peping (Peiping, Beiping) when they moved the capital to Nanjing. Jing (king) means “capital” and since it wasn’t the capital anymore it couldn’t be called “northern capital.” So they changed Jing (king) to Ping, which means “peace.” When the Communists came to power they moved the capital back north and Beiping (Peiping, Peping) — Northern Peace — became Beijing (Peking) — Northern Capital once again. As the British say, “Brilliant!!”