Mukden's Manchu capital still moves northeast China's freight
Shenyang, formerly Manchu Mukden, is Liaoning's capital and most populous city with 9,070,093 people in the 2020 census—Northeast China's largest. Ming military stronghold, then prize of the 1621 Battle of Shen-Liao, it later anchored Qing rise and twentieth-century heavy industry linking Japan, Russia, and Korea.
The first walled town here, Hou City, was founded around 300 BCE by the Yan general Qin Kai after he took Liaodong from Gojoseon; roughly 350 years later Donghu nomads burned it and it was abandoned. The Liao captured the area in 916 and called it Shen Prefecture, the Yuan made it the Shenyang Circuit, and under the Ming it became a guard town and one of the key fortresses beyond the Shanhai Pass.
Its imperial moment came with the Manchus. Nurhaci seized it from the Ming in 1625 and moved his whole government there, building the Imperial Palace; in 1634 it was renamed Mukden, or Shengjing, both meaning a rising capital. After the Qing crossed the Shanhai Pass in 1644 the court moved to Beijing, but Shenyang stayed the dynasty's secondary capital and spiritual home, guarding royal treasures and the tombs of the early emperors.
Rival empires then competed for it. After Japan's victory over China in 1895, Li Hongzhang signed a secret treaty in Moscow in 1896 letting Russia run a railway across Manchuria. The Battle of Mukden, fought from 19 February to 10 March 1905 with more than 600,000 combatants, was the biggest battle since Leipzig in 1813 and the largest in Asia before the Second World War. Japan's win made the city a base for its expansion, and in 1910 and 1911 it was a focus of the Manchurian plague, which killed about 60,000 people.
The city took back the name Shenyang in 1914, though foreign postmarks read Moukden into the late 1920s. In that decade it was the seat of the warlord Zhang Zuolin, whose ammunition factories seeded later industry; he was killed on 4 June 1928 when his train was blown up at a bridge guarded by Japanese troops. Today it anchors a metropolitan region of more than 23 million people.
Source: Shenyang
