Long Spring became Manchukuo's capital then China's Detroit
Changchun, capital of Jilin on the Songliao Plain, is a sub-provincial Chinese city of 9,066,906 people in the 2020 census, with over five million in the metro core. Meaning long spring, it was renamed Xinjing as capital of Japanese-controlled Manchukuo from 1932 to 1945, then named Jilin's provincial capital in 1954. FAW Group still anchors its City of Automobiles reputation.
Qing Jiaqing decree founded Changchun Ting as a fur-trading frontier post on the Yitong's east bank in 1800; promotion to Changchun Fu came in 1889 as Shandong and Hebei migrants arrived. Russia's Chinese Eastern Railway opened a Kuancheng station in 1898 on the Harbin–Lüshun line. After the Russo-Japanese War, Portsmouth terms handed Japan the southern tracks; Kuancheng stayed Russian gauge's last stop while a new Japanese Changchun station headed the South Manchuria Railway, with a 1907 pact allowing dual-gauge stubs between them.
From 1907 to 1931 Japan poured roughly seven million yen yearly into South Manchuria Railway Affiliated Areas planning without Chinese consent—grid plus radial boulevards from the station square, land-use slices for commerce, grain, factories, and garrison police independent of China. The 1910–11 Manchurian pneumonic plague rode the Trans-Manchurian railway and killed some sixty thousand across the region. On 10 March 1932 Manchukuo seated its capital here; three days later the city became Hsinking, with Puyi in the palace now a museum. Metropolitan plans pushed Pan-Asian concrete forms topped with ornamental Chinese or Japanese roofs as a colonial showcase.
After 1949 the industrial base shifted toward state auto manufacturing; FAW, one of China's Big Four car makers, keeps headquarters here, earning Detroit of China nicknames alongside National Garden City awards. Nature Index 2024 ranks Changchun among the world's top thirty science cities; Jilin University and Northeast Normal University sit in the Double First-Class cohort. Five districts plus a development zone form the urbanized metro, while Shuangyang and Jiutai remain less built-out within the wider municipality.
Changchun thus layers Qing trade post, Russian–Japanese rail hinge, puppet capital, and PRC auto–research hub into one northeast plain city. The long spring name outlasted Hsinking, yet radial colonial streets and FAW plants still telegraph how empire and industry wrote the map.
Source: Changchun
