Nanjing
Nanjing is the capital of Jiangsu, a province in East China. The city, which is located in the southwestern corner of the province, has 11 districts, an administrative area of, and as of 2021 a population of 9,423,400.
Situated in the Yangtze River Delta, Nanjing has a prominent place in Chinese history and culture, having served as the capital of various Chinese dynasties, kingdoms and republican governments dating from the 3rd century to 1949, and has thus long been a major center of culture, education, research, politics, economy, transport networks and tourism, being the home to one of the world's largest inland ports. The city is also one of the fifteen sub-provincial cities in the People's Republic of China's administrative structure, enjoying jurisdictional and economic autonomy only slightly less than that of a province. It has also been awarded the title of 2008 Habitat Scroll of Honor of China, Special UN Habitat Scroll of Honor Award and National Civilized City. Nanjing is also considered a Beta city classification, together with Chongqing, Hangzhou and Tianjin by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network, and ranked as one of the world's top 100 cities in the Global Financial Centres Index.
As of 2021, Nanjing has 68 institutions of higher learning, including 13 double-first-class universities, ten 111-plan universities, eight 211 universities, and 97 academies. Nanjing University, which has a long history, is among the world's top 10 universities ranked by the Nature Index. The ratio of college students to the total population ranks No.1 among large cities nationwide. Nanjing has the fifth-largest scientific research output of any city in the world. As of 2024, it has been ranked as the world's second most prolific scientific research center in earth and environmental sciences and the world's third most prolific scientific research center in chemistry and physical sciences, according to the Nature Index.
Nanjing, one of the nation's most important cities for over a thousand years, is recognized as one of the Four Great Ancient Capitals of China. It has been one of the world's largest cities, enjoying peace and prosperity despite various wars and disasters. Nanjing served as the capital of Eastern Wu, one of the three major states in the Three Kingdoms period; the Eastern Jin and each of the Southern dynasties, which successively ruled southern China from 317 to 589; the Southern Tang, one of the Ten Kingdoms; the Ming dynasty when, for the first time, all of China was ruled from a city, one city ; and the Republic of China under the nationalist Kuomintang before its flight to Taiwan by Chiang Kai-Shek during the Chinese Civil War. The city also served as the seat of the rebel Taiping Heavenly Kingdom and the Japanese puppet regime of Wang Jingwei during the Second Sino-Japanese War. It suffered many notable devastating atrocities in both conflicts, most notably the Nanjing Massacre from late 1937 to early 1938.
Nanjing became the capital city of Jiangsu province in 1952, after serving as a Direct-administered Municipality from 1949 to 1952 following the establishment of the People's Republic of China. It has many important heritage sites, including the Presidential Palace, Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum and Ming Xiaoling Mausoleum. Nanjing is famous for human historical landscapes, mountains and waters such as Fuzimiao, Ming Palace, Chaotian Palace, Porcelain Tower, Drum Tower, Stone City, City Wall, Qinhuai River, Xuanwu Lake and Purple Mountain. Key cultural facilities include Nanjing Library, Nanjing Museum and Jiangsu Art Museum.
Names
The name Nanjing was originally informal, appearing in Xiao Zixian's 6th-century reply to Xiao Tong during the Northern and Southern Dynasties era of Chinese history. Synonyms were also used, like Nandu. Under the Hongwu Emperor who founded the Ming dynasty, after the abandonment of plans for a third capital at Fengyang, a distinction began to be made between his northern capital at Kaifeng and the southern one at Yingtian. This distinction was continued and eventually formalized after his son the Yongle Emperor relocated his court to Shuntian or Beijing. The continuation of the dual arrangement was required to respect the wishes of his father, whose Ancestral Injunctions had insisted Nanjing should remain a permanent imperial capital. The Nanjing form of Lower Yangtze Mandarin remained a prestige dialect and the imperial lingua franca for centuries, producing formerly common romanizations of the name as Nanqim, Nankin, and Nanking. The less common Wade-Giles form of Nan-ching was an earlier attempt to represent its pronunciation in the Beijing form of Mandarin, now represented in pinyin as.The city has a number of other names, and some historical names are now used as names of districts of the city.
During the Warring States Era, settlements within modern Nanjing were known as Yuecheng and Jinlingyi or Jinling, from which Nanjing is sometimes known as Jincheng. Under the Qin, Jinling was renamed Moling.
Jianye was adopted as the name of the Wu capital during the Three Kingdoms Era. The city first became an imperial Chinese capital under the Sima Jin dynasty under the name Jiankang, a change adopted to avoid the naming taboo occasioned by the elevation of Emperor Min, whose personal name was Sima Ye. Under the Tang dynasty, it was known as Shengzhou.
During the Qing dynasty, the city resumed official use of its Northern Song name of Jiangning, romanized at the time as Kiangning. The Chinese abbreviation of jiāng for Jiangning formed the first syllable of a compound that was the source of the provincial name Jiangsu. As the capital of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom from 1851 to 1864, Nanjing was known as Tianjing. With the fall of the Qing Empire in 1911, the city was renamed Nanjing in 1912 and was the capital of the Provisional Government of the new Republic of China. However, the capital returned to Beijing by October of the same year, though the name change was retained. With the success of Kuomintang's Northern Expedition in 1927, Nanjing again became the capital of the Republic of China, and until the fall of the republic in 1949, the Chinese abbreviation was used for the city; the same abbreviation is now used for Beijing.
History
Prehistory
The 1993 discovery of "Nanjing Man" in Hulu Cave in Jiangning District established that Homo erectus reached eastern China around 600,000 years ago, hundreds of thousands of years earlier than previously thought. Following the advent of Homo sapiens in China and the end of the Last Glacial Period, the area around Nanjing was home to Neolithic settlements intermediate between societies along the Yellow River such as the Dawenkou culture and those around Lake Tai and Hangzhou Bay such as the Majiabang and Songze cultures. Agriculture was being practiced in Qixia District by 5000 BC, and the local Beiyinyangying culture possessed, a kind of rice wine vessel, by about 3000 BC.About 2000 BC, the Qinhuai River Basin was the home of the dense Bronze Age settlements of the Hushu culture. The earliest cities in Nanjing were formed around these settlements. Connecting the development of these ruins, Zhou-era burial mounds, and Chinese legends concerning the Zhou ancestors, some Chinese archaeologists have argued for Nanjing as the site of Taibo's original settlement of Wu as the Shang and Zhou encroached southward from the Central Plains around the 12th century BC.
Ancient history
In 571 BC, the state of Chu established Tangyi in Liuhe. This is the oldest extant administrative establishment in Nanjing. In 541 BC, Wuby then centered on Suzhoubuilt Laizhu Town in Gaochun or Gucheng. The Wu king Fuchai fortified Yecheng in Nanjing in 495BC.Wu was conquered by Yue in 473 BC, and the city was rebuilt at the mouth of the Qinhuai River the following year. Later Yuecheng was established on the outskirts of the present-day Zhonghua Gate, which was the beginning of the construction of the main city of Nanjing. In 333 BC, Chu defeated Yue and built Jinlingyi in the western part of Nanjing. It was the earliest administrative construction in the main city of Nanjing.
In 210 BC, the First Emperor of Qin visited the east and changed Jinling City to Moling. The area was successively part of the Kuaiji, Zhang, and Danyang prefectures under the Qin and Han dynasties. It was part of the Yangzhou region which was established by Han Wudi in Yuanfeng 5. Nanjing was later made the seat of Danyang Prefecture and served as the chief city in the Yangzhou region for about 400 years from the late Han to the early Tang.
Capital of the Six Dynasties
The Six Dynasties is a collective term for six Chinese dynasties that all maintained national capitals at Jiankang. The six dynasties were the Eastern Wu, the Eastern Jin, and the four Southern Dynasties of the Liu Song, Southern Qi, Liang, and Chen.At the end of the Eastern Han dynasty, the warlord Sun Quan, who ruled Jiangdong, moved his ruling office to Moling in 211. The following year, he built the Stone City at the site of Jinlingyi, and renamed Moling to Jianye. After Sun Quan proclaimed himself emperor in 229, Jianye served as the capital of his Eastern Wu dynasty through the Three Kingdoms period. By the time Wu was conquered by the Western Jin dynasty in 280, Jianye and its neighboring areas had been well cultivated, developing into one of the commercial, cultural, and political centers of China.
Not long after the unification of China, the Western Jin collapsed under the weight of the War of the Eight Princes and rebellions from the so-called "Five Barbarians" in the north. Jianye, renamed Jiankang in 313 to avoid Emperor Min's taboo personal name, was safely isolated from the chaos and became a popular refuge for the northern nobles and wealthy families. In 318, the ruling prince in Jiankang, Sima Rui, proclaimed himself the new emperor and reestablished the dynasty as the Eastern Jin dynasty. This marked the first time a Chinese dynastic capital was moved from the north to southern China, as the north came under the rule of the Sixteen Kingdoms.
File:Pagoda at Qixia Temple Nanjing.jpg|upright|thumb|The Śarīra pagoda in Qixia Temple. It was built in AD601 and rebuilt in the 10th century.
Jiankang was the center of administration in the south for more than two and a half centuries, even as China entered the Northern and Southern dynasties period. After the Eastern Jin fell in 420, it continued to serve as the capital for the Southern dynasties of Liu Song, Southern Qi, Liang and Chen. During this time, Jiankang was the international hub of East Asia. Based on historical documents, the city had 280,000 registered households. Assuming an average Nanjing household consisted of about 5.1 people, the city had more than 1.4 million residents. The Hou Jing Disturbance of 548552, however, ended with a major systematic massacre of the city's people.
A number of spirit ways of that era, erected at the tombs of royals and other dignitaries, have survived in various degrees of preservation in Nanjing's northeastern and eastern suburbs, primarily in Qixia and Jiangning District. Possibly the best preserved of them is the ensemble of the Tomb of Xiao Xiu, a brother of Emperor Wu of Liang.