Beijing or Peking
Manchu, after they invaded China, overthrew Ming dynasty and founded Qing dynasty. Beijing remained the capital of Qing’s China throughout the entire rule of the dynasty. Just like at the time of the previous dynasties, the city was still called Jingshi or Gemun Hecen in Manchu. When Beijing was occupied in 1860, the English and French looted and burned down the Emperor’s Palace Yuan Ming Yuan. In 1900 the city survived a siege and invasion of the allied army of the Western powers during the Boxers’ rebellion.
In 1911 the bourgeois Xinhai Revolution took place in China which overthrew Qing power and proclaimed the Republic; initially the capital was supposed to be moved to Nanjing. But after Qing’s high statesman Yuan Shikai took side with the revolutionaries and forced the Emperor to resign to make the success of the revolution inevitable, revolutionaries in Nanjing agreed that Yuan Shikai should be the President of the proclaimed Chinese Republic and the capital should stay in Beijing.
Yuan Shikai began to gradually consolidate power in his hands which in 1915 ended in his proclaiming the formation of the Chinese Empire, him being the Emperor. This decision turned away many revolutionaries from him, and he himself died a year later. After his death China split up into several regions under the control of local generals. Between the most powerful of them frequent clashes began for the control over Beijing (Zhili-Anhui War, the First Zhili-Fengtian War, and the Second Zhili-Fengtian War).
Following the success of the Kuomintang Northern Expedition, which pacified the warlords of the north, the capital of the Republic of China was officially moved to Nanjing in 1928, while Beijing’s name was changed to Beiping (literally “northern peace”) which was supposed to emphasize the illegitimacy of the Military Government in Beijing.
During the Second Sino-Japanese War, Beiping fell to Japan on 29 July 1937. During occupation the city was given back the name “Beijing” and it was made the seat of the Provisional Government of the Republic of China, a puppet state that ruled the ethnic Chinese portions of Japanese-occupied northern China; the government was later merged into the larger Wang Jingwei Government based in Nanjing. The Emperor’s Army of Japan allocated in the city unit #1855, which was involved in bacteriological research and was a subdivision of unit #731. In them Japanese medics experimented on human beings.
On August 15 of 1945 simultaneously with Japan’s capitulation in the Second World War Beijing was again renamed to Beiping.