Short answers, pulled from the story.
Beijing means 'Northern Capital', from the characters 北 for north and 京 for capital. The name was applied to the city in 1403 during the Ming dynasty to distinguish it from Nanjing, the 'Southern Capital'.
Peking was an older English spelling used by the Jesuit missionary Martino Martini in a popular atlas published in Amsterdam in 1655. The modern spelling Beijing follows the government's official romanization, adopted in the 1980s. The old form survives in names like Beijing Capital International Airport's IATA code PEK and Peking University.
Beijing has more than 22 million residents, making it the world's most populous national capital city. In 2024 the municipality had a total population of 21.83 million, of which 19.26 million resided in urban districts or suburban townships.
Beijing hosted the 2008 Summer Olympics and 2008 Summer Paralympics, and the 2022 Winter Olympics. In 2022 it became the first city ever to host both the Summer and Winter Olympics, and also both the Summer and Winter Paralympics.
Beijing has eight UNESCO World Heritage Sites: the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, the Summer Palace, the Ming Tombs, the Zhoukoudian Peking Man Site, the Beijing Central Axis, and parts of the Great Wall and the Grand Canal.
After declaring a 'war on pollution' in 2014, Beijing replaced coal power with natural gas and cleaned up polluting industrial facilities. Fine particulate PM2.5 fell 35 percent in 2017 and reached 30 micrograms per cubic meter in 2022. In 2024 the city had only two days of heavy pollution, down 96.6 percent from 58 days in 2013.