In mainland China, most place names are in Mandarin Chinese, the country's official spoken language. Even though the sounds of Mandarin Chinese have not changed for a long time, there were many different ways to write Chinese place names in Mandarin using the Roman alphabet, or many different kinds of romanizations. This created a lot of confusion and misinformation for non-Chinese speakers on what to call Chinese place names. For example, Beijing was spelled Peking, Nanjing was called Nanking, Tianjin was spelled Tiantsin, and Qingdao was spelled Tsingtao. These many spelling systems caused confusion among non-Chinese speakers and therefore whatever name speakers of other languages called place names ended up sounding very different from Mandarin Chinese. In order to teach people how to correctly pronounce Mandarin Chinese, to mainland Chinese and non-Chinese alike, the Chinese Communist Party made Hanyu Pinyin the only accepted romanization in official use and banned all other romanizations in official use in mainland China. Peking became Beijing, Nanking became Nanjing, Tiantsin became Tianjin, and Tsingtao became Qingdao. While the pronunciation of these place names stayed the same in Mandarin, it allowed non-Chinese speakers, especially English speakers, to say Chinese place names much more accurately to their Mandarin pronunciations.