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Beijing Destination GuideHistory
There were cities in the vicinities of Beijing by the 1st millennium BC, and the capital of the State of Yan, one of the powers of the Warring States Period, was established at Ji , near modern Beijing. It has often been claimed that Ji was the beginning of Beijing but Ji had been abandoned no later than the 6th century AD. The exact location of Ji remains unknown despite much effort in recent decades to identify the site. Beijing literally means "northern capital", a role it has played many times in China's long history. While various small towns and warlord capitals have been traced back as far as the 1st millennium BCE, Beijing first served as the capital of a (more or less) united China in 1264 when Kublai Khan's victorious Mongol forces set up the city of Dadu, ("Great Capital") to rule their new empire, from a northern location closer to the Mongol homelands. After the fall of the Mongol Yuan dynasty in 1368, the capital was moved back to Nanjing ("southern capital"), but in 1403, the 3rd Ming emperor Zhu Di moved it to Beijing again and also gave the city its present name.
The Kuomintang thus moved the capital to Nanjing again in 1928, renaming Beijing as Beiping ("Northern Peace") to emphasize that it was no longer a capital. However, the Kuomintang was eventually defeated by the Communists, who in 1949 proclaimed the People's Republic of China with its capital at Beijing.
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China was one of the earliest centres of human civilization. Chinese civilization was also one of the few to invent writing independently, the others being ancient Mesopotamia (Sumerians), India (Indus Valley Civilization), the Mayan Civilization, and Ancient Egypt. The Chinese script is still used today by the Chinese and Japanese, and to a lesser extent by Koreans and Vietnamese. This script is the only logographic script still used in the world.
This was Beijing's golden era: the Forbidden Palace, the Temple of Heaven and many other Beijing landmarks were built at this time. Beijing remained the capital into the Qing era and into the revolutionary ferment of the early 1900s, but in the chaos following the abdication of the last Emperor, Beijing was beset by fighting warlords. |