10 famous cities that changed their names over time

A city's name records whoever held power when it was chosen. Colonial administrators, revolutionary governments and newly independent states have all redrawn the map to erase a predecessor or stake a claim of their own. The result is a long roster of cities that changed their names, whose discarded labels still surface in old atlases, family letters, airport codes and product branding. The places themselves often look nothing like they did when those names were in use.

Tracking these switches is a shortcut into modern political history. When a colonial title gives way to an indigenous one, the change usually marks the end of foreign rule. When a new government renames a city after one of its own leaders, it signals a break with a monarchy, a war or a discredited past. Some changes were quiet and bureaucratic, the product of spelling reform or a new transliteration standard. Others arrived with revolution, occupation or a coup.

The timing varies widely. Istanbul's official break with Constantinople dates to 1930, old enough that a 1953 novelty song was written about it. Mumbai replaced Bombay in 1995, recent enough that plenty of residents still use both. A few of these cities ran through more than one name. St. Petersburg has carried three titles in just over three centuries. Several renamings never fully landed. Vietnamese speakers and overseas communities still say Saigon, the Bombay Stock Exchange kept its old title and Peking duck was never rebranded.

The 10 entries that follow span Europe, Asia and Africa. Each explains what the city was called before, who ordered the change and what the place is called now. That context does practical work. When a grandparent mentions Rangoon, an archive labels a photograph Batavia or a novel is set in Christiania, the modern city on the map becomes identifiable. It also explains why some old names refuse to disappear. A name change is a legal act, but usage is a habit, and the two rarely move at the same speed.

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Istanbul became the city's sole official name in 1930, replacing Constantinople, which had identified the settlement for roughly 1,600 years. The Turkish Republic made the change as part of a wider push to standardize place names and shed the administrative vocabulary of the Ottoman era.

The older name honored the Roman emperor Constantine the Great, who in 330 AD made the city the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. It held that role through the Byzantine centuries, until Ottoman forces under Mehmed II captured it in 1453. Ottoman rulers did not discard Constantinople right away. The name stayed in official and diplomatic use alongside other local names for centuries afterward.

The end of empire forced the issue. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk founded the Republic of Turkey in 1923 and placed the capital inland at Ankara. Stripped of its role as the seat of government, the city was renamed in line with the republic's secular, Turkish-language program. Enforcement arrived through the mail. Turkish postal authorities began rejecting or returning foreign correspondence addressed to Constantinople. Governments, shipping firms and newspapers abroad fell into line and adopted the new spelling.

The name itself predates the 1930 decree by centuries. It traces to the Greek phrase "eis tin polin," meaning roughly "to the city" — a shorthand residents used for generations while the formal name remained Constantinople. Before Constantine, the site was a Greek colony called Byzantium, founded around 657 BC. That gives the place at least three major names across its recorded history.

Istanbul today is Turkey's largest city and its commercial center, with a population above 15 million spread across both banks of the Bosphorus and two continents. Ankara keeps the political functions. Constantinople survives mainly in Byzantine and Ottoman scholarship, in church history, and in the 1953 novelty song "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)," which fixed a bureaucratic decision from two decades earlier into popular memory.

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Bombay officially became Mumbai in 1995, by order of the Shiv Sena-led government of Maharashtra. The name honors Mumbadevi, a Hindu goddess long venerated by the city's Koli fishing community and treated as its patron deity. The switch formed part of a broader push to replace names tied to foreign rule with ones drawn from local language.

The older name most likely traces to the Portuguese, who held the cluster of islands that became the city from the 16th century. They used a form resembling "Bom Bahia," meaning good bay. England acquired the territory in 1661 through the marriage treaty between Catherine of Braganza and King Charles II. The crown leased it to the East India Company in 1668 for a nominal annual rent. Under company rule and then direct British administration, the port grew into a cotton trading center and a seat of colonial government.

Pressure to shed colonial place names built after independence in 1947. The 1995 decision answered a narrower political demand. It drew on Marathi regional identity and on the strength of Marathi nationalist parties in Maharashtra. Their argument was that the city belonged to the state's majority language community rather than to its English-speaking commercial class.

Adoption was uneven. Residents, businesses and foreign news outlets said Bombay for years afterward, and several institutions never changed at all. The Bombay Stock Exchange, Asia's oldest, still trades under that name. The Bombay High Court keeps its title, as do companies, clubs and schools founded before the switch.

Mumbai is India's financial capital, with a metropolitan population above 20 million. It hosts the country's two main stock exchanges, the Reserve Bank of India and the headquarters of much of its banking sector. The Hindi-language film industry known as Bollywood is based there as well. Bombay still circulates in conversation and in older institutional names, but Mumbai is the only version that appears on government documents.

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Beijing's shift from Peking was a change in spelling, not a change in name. The Chinese characters for the city never changed; what changed was the system used to write them in the Latin alphabet. China made pinyin its official romanization standard in 1958, and the rest of the world took about two decades to follow.

Peking came out of earlier European transcriptions and the postal romanization used during the late Qing and Republican periods. Those systems preserved older pronunciations and conventions that no longer matched standard Mandarin as it was codified in the 20th century. Pinyin, developed by Chinese linguists and keyed to Mandarin as spoken in the capital, renders the name Beijing.

The name translates as northern capital. Nanjing, several hundred miles south, means southern capital, and the two work as a matched pair in Chinese geography.

The city did undergo one genuine name change in the modern era. After the Nationalist government moved the capital to Nanjing in 1928, the northern city was renamed Beiping, or northern peace. The Communist government restored the name Beijing in 1949, when it proclaimed the People's Republic there.

International adoption of pinyin arrived in stages. The United Nations began using it for Chinese geographic names in the late 1970s, and wire services, foreign ministries and atlas publishers followed. Mao Tse-tung became Mao Zedong in the same wave of respellings.

A handful of names kept the old spelling on purpose. Peking University, founded in 1898, never changed its English name, and neither did Peking duck, the lacquered roast dish served in restaurants worldwide. Peking Man, the fossil hominid remains excavated at Zhoukoudian southwest of the city, also keeps the archaic form in scientific literature.

Beijing is home to more than 21 million people and serves as China's political, cultural and academic center. It held the capital through most of the Ming and Qing dynasties. Shanghai, not Beijing, is the country's main commercial and financial hub.

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Saigon became Ho Chi Minh City in 1976, the year after North Vietnamese forces captured the city and ended the Vietnam War. The reunified country's National Assembly named it for Ho Chi Minh, the revolutionary leader who directed the independence campaign against French rule and later against the U.S.-backed government in the south. He died in 1969 and never saw the change.

Saigon served as the capital of South Vietnam from 1955 until April 1975. The final days of that government produced the images most Americans associate with the war's end — helicopters lifting evacuees from rooftops, crowds pressed against embassy gates. The episode is still known as the Fall of Saigon. No official renaming has displaced that phrase.

Other names attached to the site long before either one. A Khmer settlement called Prey Nokor stood there first, and Vietnamese control took hold over the 17th and 18th centuries. French forces arrived in the 19th century. They rebuilt the port as the administrative and commercial anchor of French Indochina, laying out wide boulevards and European-style public buildings. The nickname from that period, the Pearl of the Far East, described its standing as a trading hub.

The older name never left circulation. Vietnamese speakers still use Saigon in everyday conversation, and it remains attached to the downtown commercial core around District 1. The international airport keeps the code SGN. Diaspora communities in the U.S., France and Australia use Saigon almost exclusively, often as a deliberate marker of distance from the government that renamed the city.

Ho Chi Minh City is now Vietnam's largest city and its main economic center, with a population above nine million. Hanoi, in the north, holds the political capital. Visitors encounter both names within a single day — one on immigration stamps, airline tickets and official signage, the other on shopfronts, in taxi directions and in ordinary speech. The 1976 decree settled the paperwork without settling the vocabulary.

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Oslo took back its medieval name on January 1, 1925, ending roughly three centuries under the Danish-imposed title Christiania. It is one of the few capitals here to recover an older name rather than adopt a new one.

The settlement dates to around 1040, and Oslo was what people called it for close to 600 years. A fire in 1624 destroyed much of the timber-built town. King Christian IV, who ruled Denmark-Norway from Copenhagen, ordered it rebuilt on a new site below the fortress of Akershus and attached his own name to the result.

Christiania outlasted the Danish period. Denmark backed the losing side in the Napoleonic Wars and ceded Norway to Sweden in 1814, and the name stayed. It survived the dissolution of the Swedish union in 1905, when Norway became fully sovereign under its own king, and lasted two more decades after that.

The spelling moved first. The official form shifted from Christiania to Kristiania in 1877, swapping the Danish "Ch" for a "K" in keeping with Norwegian orthographic reform. The name therefore passed through three stages: Christiania, Kristiania and the restored Oslo.

Parliament's vote to return to Oslo belonged to a wider project of national self-definition after independence, which also reshaped the Norwegian written language. The old name had never fully disappeared. A district east of the city center still carried it, giving the restoration a geographic anchor rather than a purely symbolic one.

Oslo is now Norway's capital and largest city, with a metropolitan population of roughly one million, and the center of its government, shipping and finance. The Nobel Peace Prize ceremony takes place at the city hall each December. Christiania causes little confusion today, surviving mainly in references to Norwegian history and to literature of the 17th through early 20th centuries.

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Tokyo was called Edo until 1868, when the new Meiji government renamed it and moved the emperor's residence there from Kyoto. The name means "eastern capital," a deliberate counterpart to Kyoto, whose name means "capital city." Both names are Japanese, so no colonial label was being stripped away.

Edo began as a modest settlement on Tokyo Bay and became the center of Japanese power in 1603, when Tokugawa Ieyasu established his shogunate there. Real authority sat in Edo Castle for the next two and a half centuries. The emperor remained in Kyoto with ceremonial standing and little practical power.

The city grew quickly under that arrangement. The shogunate required regional lords to maintain households in Edo and to spend alternating periods in residence. That policy kept provincial elites under supervision and filled the city with their retainers, families and suppliers. Historical estimates place Edo's population above one million by the early 1700s, which would have made it one of the largest cities in the world.

The Meiji Restoration of 1868 ended shogunate rule and returned direct authority to the emperor. Renaming Edo and installing the young Emperor Meiji in the former shogun's castle folded the old regime's seat of power into the new order rather than discarding it. The castle grounds became the Imperial Palace and remain so today. No legislation ever formally stripped Kyoto of its status. The shift happened through the emperor's relocation rather than a single clean decree.

Greater Tokyo is now the most populous metropolitan area on Earth, with more than 37 million residents across the capital and the surrounding prefectures. The old name never disappeared. Historians use "Edo period" for the 1603 to 1868 span of Tokugawa rule. Ukiyo-e woodblock prints from those years remain among Japan's best-known artworks abroad. Edomae sushi still describes the style that developed around fish caught in Tokyo Bay. Edo survives as a historical marker inside the city that replaced it.

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Jakarta was called Batavia for more than three centuries. Japanese occupying forces dropped the Dutch name in 1942, and the Indonesian republic made the change permanent after declaring independence in 1945. The modern name descends from Jayakarta, the port that stood on the site before European conquest.

The Dutch East India Company seized the town in 1619 and rebuilt it as Batavia, borrowing from the Batavi, an ancient Germanic people the Dutch claimed as ancestors. The company ran its Asian trading network from there, and the capital of the Dutch East Indies followed. Engineers laid out canals on an Amsterdam model, a design poorly suited to a tropical delta. Colonial authorities enforced rigid residential separation by ethnic group.

Earlier layers of the city survive in its naming history. A port under the Hindu kingdom of Sunda carried the name Sunda Kelapa. Forces from Islamic states on Java took it in 1527 and renamed it Jayakarta, an Old Javanese phrase read as "victorious deed" or "complete victory." That word, shortened, is the direct ancestor of the name used today.

Japanese administrators who occupied the Dutch East Indies in 1942 had a political motive for the switch. Erasing Batavia from signs and documents weakened Dutch cultural authority in a territory Japan intended to control. Indonesian nationalists kept the name when they proclaimed the republic on Aug. 17, 1945. The Netherlands fought to reclaim the colony and recognized Indonesian sovereignty only in 1949, by which point Jakarta was fixed as the capital.

The metropolitan area now holds more than 30 million people, which places it among the largest urban regions in the world. Subsidence and flooding have pushed the government to build a new capital, Nusantara, on the island of Borneo, with state administrative functions moving there in stages. Jakarta is expected to remain the country's commercial center regardless. Dutch-era warehouses and the old square at Kota Tua still carry the physical imprint of Batavia.

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Yangon has been the official English name since 1989, when Myanmar's ruling military council replaced Rangoon along with dozens of other place names inherited from British administration. The country's own name changed at the same time, from Burma to Myanmar, and both sets of names remain in use depending on who is speaking.

What changed in 1989 was the English rendering, not the Burmese word behind it. Burmese speakers had long pronounced the name in a way much closer to Yangon, usually translated as "end of strife." Rangoon was the spelling British officials wrote down and standardized as Britain annexed Burmese territory in stages through the 19th century. The port eventually became the capital of British Burma.

The body behind the decision was the State Law and Order Restoration Council, the junta that seized power in September 1988 after security forces crushed a nationwide pro-democracy uprising. That origin shaped how the new names landed abroad. The U.S. government, parts of the British press and many exiled activists kept writing Burma and Rangoon as a way of withholding recognition from the generals. The United Nations and most other governments adopted the new forms.

Yangon served as the capital of independent Burma from 1948 until 2005, when the military moved the seat of government to Naypyidaw, a purpose-built city roughly 200 miles to the north. The transfer was announced with almost no warning, and ministries were ordered to relocate within days. Naypyidaw remains thinly populated, and its multi-lane highways carry little traffic.

About five million people live in Yangon today, making it Myanmar's largest city and its commercial center despite the loss of capital status. The Shwedagon Pagoda, the gilded Buddhist stupa that dominates the skyline, anchors religious life and tourism there. Rangoon still appears in colonial histories, older fiction and the writing of groups that reject the military's authority.

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St. Petersburg has held three official names since its founding in 1703. It was Petrograd from 1914, Leningrad from 1924, and St. Petersburg again after a 1991 referendum. Each change followed a shift in who governed Russia and what the state wanted the city to stand for.

Tsar Peter the Great founded the city in 1703 on marshland taken from Sweden, naming it for his patron saint rather than for himself. It served as capital of the Russian Empire for roughly two centuries, built as a Western-facing port and seat of the court.

Anti-German sentiment drove the first change. In 1914, weeks after Russia entered World War I against Germany, Nicholas II replaced the Germanic-sounding Sankt Peterburg with the Slavic Petrograd. The city carried that name through the revolutions of 1917, which ended tsarist rule and brought the Bolsheviks to power.

Lenin died in January 1924. Soviet authorities renamed the city Leningrad in his honor within days, and the name stayed on maps for 67 years. That period includes the siege by Nazi German forces, which began in 1941 and lasted nearly 900 days. More than a million civilians died of starvation, cold and bombardment.

The reversal came as the Soviet Union broke apart. Residents voted in a June 1991 referendum to restore the founding name, part of a wider rollback of Soviet-era commemoration across the country. The margin was narrow. Some residents objected to discarding a name bound up with the siege and its dead.

One piece of the Soviet map survives. The surrounding administrative region is still called Leningrad Oblast, so visitors to St. Petersburg never actually leave Leningrad territory.

The city is now Russia's second largest, with a population of roughly five million. It holds the Hermitage Museum, which occupies the former Winter Palace, along with much of the country's surviving imperial architecture.