Yuan era scholar Zhou Deqing published a book detailing a standard spoken Chinese, named Zhongyuan Yayin (Elegant pronunciation of the Central Plains), meant to represent the common spoken language rather than the "correct" literary pronunciation reflected in the Song dictionaries.
[2] During the flight of the Song literati to the South after the Jurchen conquest, Neo-Confucians began to fixate on the idea of restoring "correct" pronunciation as it was believed to be spoken by the ancients.
[3] Ming scholar Lu Kun criticised the Hongwu Zhengyun as too distant from the "elegant pronunciation of middle China" and was not actually spoken by court officials.
[2] The Ming (1368–1644) and Qing dynasties (1644–1912) began to use the term Guanhua (官話) 'official speech' to refer to the dialect used at the courts.
Historically, the word "Mandarin" refers to the language spoken by the upper classes of 19th-century Beijing, as well as by the higher civil servants and military officers of the imperial regime serving throughout the country.
[4] In the 17th century, the Qing had set up orthoepy academies (正音書院; Zhèngyīn shūyuàn) in an attempt to make pronunciation conform to the Beijing standard.
A Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation was convened with delegates from the entire country, who were chosen based as often on political considerations as often as on linguistic expertise.
The conference deadlocked between promoters of northern and southern pronunciation standards and as a result, a compromise was produced.
However, in Hong Kong and Macau, due to historical and linguistic reasons, the language of education and both formal and informal speech remains Cantonese despite the growing use of Standard Chinese.