Southern Capital: one of China’s four great ancient seats
Nanjing, capital of Jiangsu in the Yangtze River Delta and home to about 9.4 million people, is one of China’s Four Great Ancient Capitals. Its name, meaning Southern Capital, was fixed in 1368 by the first Ming emperor, and dynasties ruled from the site over some seventeen centuries.
The Hongwu Emperor chose the name to set his new capital apart from the northern capital at Kaifeng, and it later paired with Beijing. Westerners once wrote it Nankin or Nanking. Long before, a fourth-century BCE settlement here was called Jinling, meaning ridge with the gold, and the Qin renamed it Moling. Neolithic cemeteries near the city centre, one holding 225 burials with jade and agate, show far older habitation.
In 211 the warlord Sun Quan moved his base here, fortified Shitou Hill as the Stone City and renamed the place Jianye, making it capital of Eastern Wu after proclaiming himself emperor in 229. Renamed Jiankang in 313, it became capital of the Eastern Jin in 317 and then of the Southern Dynasties. Canals made it a trade hub, brick walls appeared around 480, and in the first half of the sixth century its population probably topped 300,000.
Jiankang was also a centre of poetry and Buddhism, with more than 500 monasteries by the Liang dynasty, including the Tongtai Temple of 527, where Emperor Wu took part as a lay devotee. That golden age ended in 548, when the former general Hou Jing besieged the palace city for five months; loyalists who defeated him in 552 looted it anyway.
From 1949 to 1952 Nanjing was a directly administered municipality before becoming Jiangsu’s capital. Landmarks include the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum, the Ming Xiaoling tomb, the city wall and Purple Mountain, and the city has one of the world’s largest inland ports. In 2021 it counted 68 institutions of higher learning, with Nanjing University among the world’s top ten on the Nature Index.
Source: Nanjing
