Peking / Beijing

When I was young, I saw a TV news item that told me that Peking was now no longer called Peking, it was called Beijing.  (Perhaps the news item was in fact a bit more accurate than that and went into the gory details of Wade-Giles and pinyin, but if it was, it all went over my head).  It struck me as a puzzling thing to happen to a city, being renamed like that.  This must have been at the time of the 1979 pinyinization.  Peking still persists in the names of institutions that want to boast about their age, such as Peking University (and I think that on the Chinese version of the site, the last character in 'university' on the logo is the unsimplified version  學 as opposed to 学, for added old-fashionedness).

I keep wanting to train my ear to hear the sounds of Chinese properly: never mind the tones, many of the initials are very hard to distinguish.  Perhaps something to do next year.