INTRODUCTION - Living Abroad in Beijing - page 5

“b.” Some argue that early linguists to China used phonetic coding such as the old
postal system to romanize what they heard. This system would have given the writ-
ten form of “peking.” Other theorists blame the mixup on the traveling Jesuit priests
of the time, who typically came from countries speaking romance languages, such
as French, Spanish, Italian, or Portuguese. In these languages, sounds such as “p”
and “t” are not aspirated, so, to the priests' ears, the unaspirated sound at the start of
Beijing would have sounded just like a “p.” They wrote it down, and the rest of us
adopted it. (As to why many Westerners like to use a French-style “j” sound rather
than a clear crisp “j” sound as the Chinese do is less clear.)
The Chinese government decreed in the 1970s that the capital's name should
be spelled “Beijing,” in line with what had become the official phonetic system,
p ī ny ī n or Pinyin. It wasn't until the late 1980s, however, that it was really taken on-
board. Today a few countries around the world continue to drag the chain, and even
Beijing itself seems to have been remiss on few points of correction. One of the city's
biggest universities, B ě ij ī ng Dàxué (or B ě i Dà for short) is still referred to as Peking
University when dealing with foreigners, and you're just as likely to hear Peking op-
era said as you are Beijing opera. But you can definitely leave your Peking duck at
home—here it's B ě ij ī ngk ǎ oy ā (Beijing roast duck), every time, without fail.
The Lay of the Land
While Italy is clearly a boot, China is lovingly thought by its people to resemble a chicken,
and Beijing sits right in the middle of the chicken's neck. It's neither lapped by a sea nor
threaded by any river worthy of note. Instead, it's a dry and increasingly dusty land-locked
domain. So with no port or any major body of water to its name, how did it become the
capital of this vast country?
Despite its portless existence, Beijing's development and history has in reality been
greatly influenced by its geography. It covers a total area of 16,801 square kilometers (6,487
square miles), making its size somewhere between that of Connecticut and New Jersey. It
sits at the northern point of the North China Plain, a far-reaching territory that, overall, also
takes in much of Hebei, Henan, Anhui, Jiangsu, and Shandong provinces, as well as the city
of Tianjin. The plain's southern border extends to the Huai River, still a good distance north
of Shanghai. In the east it reaches out to the Yellow Sea and to the Bohai Sea in the north-