> The British called the capital of China "Peking"

Also worth noting, a lot of slightly "off" spellings/pronunciations of Chinese are just transliteration problems.

Basically, if some other country (like China) has words not in your language, that don't even have a "correct English spelling", because that country doesn't use an English alphabet, better yet doesn't even use a phonetic alphabet,

then all the "English spellings" of those words are just someone coming up with their best attempt to write something that tells English language speakers "it sounds like this."

Now, someone important at some point will try to come up with a whole system that doesn't JUST spell out words, but spells out in general "ok if it has this sound, we'll spell it like THIS."

Way back when, some British guys, a Mr. Wade and a Mr. Giles, came up with a system like that, and it caught on, and the world (or the English, which close enough) adopted the "Wade-Giles" system of spelling Chinese words.

Unfortunately, Wade-Giles honestly isn't that great. It has some spellings that don't do a great job of telling you what the words actually sound like. Which is why many years later someone came out with a newer (IMO better system, Pin-Yin)

But some examples of weird spelling,

A sound the most English speakers would associated with B they chose to use P, thus "BeiJing" being mis-transliterated as "PeiKing"

Another infamous one, the sound most English speaks would associated with "Ch" or maybe a Soft Q, Wade Giles chose a Ts. They also chose a T to represent what most modern speakers would associated more with a medium D.

Thus "TsingTao" beer, brewed in a place that is actually spelled QingDao and both the beer and place are more accurately pronounced as "CHing-Daow".

Also on that same Hard T should be a medium D, that's why the Rap group "Wu Tang" clan is named after the kung fu (gung-fu) movie representation of the "Wu Tang" temple that should actually sound more like "Oo Dang"