A railway stop named Shi family village became Hebei's capital
Shijiazhuang, capital of Hebei 266 kilometers southwest of Beijing, administered 11,235,086 people in 2020 (about 6.23 million in the main built-up core), ranking twelfth among mainland Chinese cities. East of the Taihang Mountains, it exploded after 1949 as industry and infrastructure multiplied the metro population more than fourfold in thirty years.
The region itself is old. Xianyu people held it early in the Zhou era, later the states of Zhongshan and Zhao, and after conquering Zhao the first Qin emperor made it the Hengshan Commandery. Under the Tang it became Zhen Prefecture, renamed to avoid the personal name of Emperor Muzong. For centuries the dominant city was Zhending, now Zhengding County, a few miles north, which Marco Polo noted in passing; the name Shijiazhuang first appears on a temple stele in 1535, when it was a modest market town.
How it got its name is disputed. One tale says the Wanli Emperor sent 24 officers and their families, who split into hamlets of ten and fourteen households, and since ten and stone sound alike in Chinese, the village of ten families drifted into the village of the Shi family. Another credits a senior official surnamed Shi. In 1925 the Republican government briefly made it the city of Shijia, then, after a merger with the village of Xiumen, incorporated it as Shimen that August.
Railways made it. The Beijing–Hankou line arrived in 1905, and in 1907 a branch west to Taiyuan in Shanxi started from here, turning a local market into a national crossroads for grain, tobacco and cotton; by 1935 it had eclipsed Zhengding. Communist forces took the city on 12 November 1947, and from May 1948 to March 1949 the Party's Central Committee and army headquarters sat at Xibaipo, a village about 90 kilometres away, now a memorial.
The People's Bank of China was created here in 1948 by merging three regional banks, and it issued the first series of renminbi. Named one of fourteen priority cities under the First Five-Year Plan, Shijiazhuang more than tripled its population between 1948 and 1958, adding large cotton textile works in the 1950s and fertiliser and chemical plants in the 1960s.
Source: Shijiazhuang
