<P> Often the older name will persist in colloquial expressions . For example, the dish known in English as "Peking duck" retained that name even when the Chinese capital changed its transliteration to "Beijing". </P> <P> Changes in romanisation systems can result in minor or major changes in spelling in the Roman alphabet for geographical entities, even without any change in name or spelling in the local alphabet or other writing system . Names in non-Roman characters can also be spelled very differently when Romanised in different European languages . </P> <P> China developed and adopted the pinyin romanisation system in February 1958 in place of previous systems such as the postal romanization and Wade--Giles . Many Chinese geographical entities (and associated entities named after geographical names) thus had their English names changed . The changes sometimes appear drastic, since it is sometimes the case that the former romanisations were derived from Cantonese--the common language in British - held Hong Kong--while the newer romanisations are derived entirely from Mandarin . Pinyin was adopted by the International Organization for Standardisation in 1982 and officially adopted in Singapore (resulting in several geographical name changes of its own). However it is usually not applied in the autonomous regions of the PRC (e.g.: Lhasa, Ürümqi, Hohhot, Xigazê, Ili, Altay, Kaxgar, Hulunbuir, Erenhot), and has not resulted in any geographical name change in the SARs of Hong Kong and Macau, and is adopted only in parts of Taiwan, particularly within Taipei and other Kuomintang controlled cities and counties, in a recent push to adopt Pinyin by the Kuomintang government . </P> <P> Examples of changes: </P>

Why do so many place names in chinese history have multiple spellings
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