East Asia

In the nineteenth century, a British diplomat named Thomas Francis Wade created a system for writing Chinese words using the Roman alphabet, a process known as “Romanization.” Herbert Giles, also a British diplomat, modified the system a generation later. The “Wade–Giles” Romanization system was used for a hundred years, and even after the People’s Republic of China adopted the Hanyu Pinyin system in the 1950s, Europe and the Americas continued using Wade–Giles. Under Wade–Giles, the capital of China was known as “Peking.” The Chinese-speaking world has now widely adopted Pinyin, and so has the International Organization for Standardization. Therefore, it is now correct to say “Beijing.” There may be times, however, where sources you read and sources quoted here may use the old style. When we say “Peking Opera” and “Beijing Opera,” we are talking about the same thing.