What does the name Beijing mean?

Northern capital. Nanjing is the southern capital, Tokyo is the eastern capital, and Kyoto is simply capital city - the naming convention runs across the whole region, and reading it tells you a surprising amount of political history at a glance.

The name has moved with the politics. The city was Beijing under the Ming, then Beiping - northern peace - when the Nationalists moved the capital to Nanjing in 1928, then Beijing again in 1949. Taiwan's official maps continued to say Beiping for decades afterwards, because using the other name would have conceded who the capital belonged to.

Peking, the older English spelling, is not a mistake. It comes from a seventeenth-century French romanisation of a southern pronunciation, at a period when the sound had not yet shifted in Mandarin - which is why Peking duck, Peking opera and Peking University kept the old spelling while the city changed. The switch to Beijing followed the adoption of the pinyin romanisation system, which China standardised in 1958 and pushed internationally from the 1970s.