Nanjing

• 1. Introduction

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  Nanjing, the capital of Jiangsu province in East China, is a city of 9,423,400 people whose name simply means Southern Capital. It covers about 6600 square kilometers in the Yangtze River Delta and is divided into 11 districts. The city also holds sub-provincial rank, a status that gives it autonomy in government and economy only slightly short of a province's. Chinese tradition counts it among the Four Great Ancient Capitals, and for more than a thousand years it has ranked among the nation's most important cities.

  A name like that raises questions. Why did a city need to call itself the southern one? Who ruled from it, who destroyed it, and who rebuilt it? And how does a place with so many wars in its past now rank among the world's busiest centers of scientific research?

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• 2. Layers of Names

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  The earliest known use of the word Nanjing comes from a reply that Xiao Zixian wrote to Xiao Tong in the 6th century. It was an informal label then, and writers also used the synonym Nandu for the same city.

  Far older names survive from the Warring States era. Settlements in the area were called Yuecheng, meaning Yue City, and Jinlingyi, read as City of the Golden or Precious Burial Mound. Shortened to Jinling, the second name later produced the nickname Jincheng, or Golden City. Under the Qin, Jinling was renamed Moling, which means Fodder Mound.

  Jianye, meaning Establishing Merit, became the name of the Wu capital during the Three Kingdoms era. The next change came from court etiquette rather than conquest. Emperor Min's personal name was Sima Ye, so in 313 the city became Jiankang to avoid the naming taboo. Under the Tang, it was Shengzhou, or Ascending Prefecture. The Song renamed it Jiangning, meaning Pacified Area of the Yangtze.

  That Song name left a mark on the map of a whole region. The syllable jiang from Jiangning was joined to su from Suzhou, and the compound became the province's name, Jiangsu. The Hongwu Emperor of the Ming had called his southern seat Yingtian, meaning Following Heaven. The Taiping rebels, for their part, named their capital Tianjing, the Heavenly Capital.

  After the fall of the Qing regime in 1911, the city took the name Nanjing in 1912 and became capital of the Provisional Government of the new Republic of China. By October of that year the capital had returned to Beijing, yet the name stayed. From 1927 until 1949, the single character jing, meaning capital, served as the city's abbreviation. Beijing uses the same character today.

  Foreign spellings preserve a different story. The Nanjing form of Lower Yangtze Mandarin stayed a prestige dialect and the imperial common language for centuries. That is why older romanizations appear as Nanqim, Nankin and Nanking. The Wade-Giles spelling Nan-ching tried to capture the sound through Beijing Mandarin, and pinyin now writes it Nánjīng.

  Long before any of these names existed, though, a very different kind of human was already living in a cave in what is now Jiangning District.

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• 3. Early Capitals

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  A discovery in 1993 at Hulu Cave in Jiangning District produced what is called Nanjing Man. It showed that Homo erectus reached eastern China around 600,000 years ago, hundreds of thousands of years earlier than scholars had previously believed.

  Farming was already under way in Qixia District by 5000 BC. By about 3000 BC, the local Beiyinyangying culture made zun, a type of vessel for rice wine. Around 2000 BC, dense Bronze Age settlements of the Hushu culture filled the Qinhuai River Basin, and the earliest cities of the area grew up around them. Some Chinese archaeologists even argue that the area was the site of Taibo's original settlement of Wu, around the 12th century BC.

  The oldest surviving administrative establishment is Tangyi in Liuhe, founded by the state of Chu in 571 BC. In 495 BC, the Wu king Fuchai fortified Yecheng within present-day Nanjing. Yue conquered Wu in 473 BC and rebuilt the city at the mouth of the Qinhuai River the next year. In 333 BC, Chu defeated Yue and built Jinlingyi in the western part of the city, the earliest administrative construction in its main urban area.

  Han Wudi set up the Yangzhou region in 106 BC. Nanjing was later made the seat of Danyang Prefecture and served as the chief city of that region for about 400 years, from the late Han to the early Tang.

  In 211, the warlord Sun Quan, who ruled Jiangdong, moved his ruling office to Moling. The following year he built the Stone City at the site of Jinlingyi. After he proclaimed himself emperor in 229, the city served as capital of his Eastern Wu dynasty. When the Western Jin conquered Wu in 280, the surrounding area was well cultivated and counted among China's commercial, cultural and political centers.

  The newly unified Western Jin soon collapsed under the War of the Eight Princes and rebellions in the north. The city, safely isolated from the chaos, became a refuge for northern nobles and wealthy families. In 318, the ruling prince Sima Rui proclaimed himself emperor and reestablished the dynasty as the Eastern Jin. It was the first time a Chinese dynastic capital had moved from the north to the south, as the north came under the rule of the Sixteen Kingdoms.

  The label Six Dynasties covers Eastern Wu (AD 222-280), Eastern Jin (317-420), and the four Southern Dynasties of Liu Song, Southern Qi, Liang and Chen (420-589). The city was the administrative center of the south for more than two and a half centuries and a true international hub of East Asia. Historical documents record 280,000 registered households. At about 5.1 people per household, that implies more than 1.4 million residents. The Hou Jing Disturbance of 548-552 ended with a systematic massacre of the city's people. Spirit ways erected at the tombs of royals and dignitaries still survive in the northeastern and eastern suburbs, mainly in Qixia and Jiangning. Possibly the best preserved belongs to the Tomb of Xiao Xiu (475-518), a brother of Emperor Wu of Liang.

  The Sui dynasty ended the division by reunifying China, and it almost destroyed the city, razing it and reducing it to a small town. Revival came with the late Tang, and in 937 the Southern Tang chose the city as its capital, calling it Jinling again. Under the Song, the textile industry boomed despite the constant threat of invasion from the Jurchen-led Jin dynasty to the north. In 1129 the city became the temporary capital of the Song with the title Eastern Capital. Yue Fei and others argued for keeping the court there, but in 1139 it withdrew to Lin'an, present-day Hangzhou.

  The Mongols later destroyed the Southern Song, and under their Yuan dynasty the city's role as a textile center deepened. Odoric of Pordenone reported that the prefectural capital, which he called Chilenfu, held 360 stone bridges finer than any elsewhere in the world.

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• 4. The Ming Capital

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  Zhu Yuanzhang had already taken the title King of Wu in 1364 and rebuilt and enlarged the city as his capital, then called Yingtian Prefecture. In 1368, he overthrew the Yuan and became the Hongwu Emperor of the Ming dynasty. A central capital had been planned for his hometown of Fengyang, but the Zhongdu project was abandoned in 1379. After that, Nanjing stood alone as the capital of the Ming, officially called Jingshi, which simply means The Capital.

  Around the city he raised a wall 48 kilometers long, along with a new Ming Palace complex and government halls. It took 200,000 laborers 21 years to finish the wall, which was meant to shield the city and its region from coastal pirates. Most of the present-day City Wall dates from that time, remains in good condition, and ranks among the longest surviving city walls in China. It is believed that Nanjing was the largest city in the world from 1358 to 1425, with a population of 487,000 in 1400.

  The Yongle Emperor ended that run. He had taken power from his nephew and was unsure of the loyalty of the region's officials, so in 1421 he moved the capital to Beiping, where he had long served as regional governor with the title Prince of Yan. The Hongwu Emperor's Ancestral Injunctions, however, had insisted that Nanjing remain a permanent imperial capital. Yongle therefore preserved its special status, at least in name. The northern capital became known as Beijing and the southern one as Nanjing, each directly administering its own territory: Beizhili in the north and Nanzhili in the south.

  On the 24th of February 1425, the Hongxi Emperor, who wanted to restore Nanjing as the sole imperial capital, appointed Admiral Zheng He as its defender. Zheng He kept command of the Ming treasure fleet for the city's defense. He governed with three eunuchs for internal matters and two military noblemen for external ones, all awaiting the emperor's return from the north with the military establishment. The emperor died on the 29th of May 1425, before that could happen. His successor, the Xuande Emperor, preferred to stay in Beijing. Even so, official documents named Nanjing the actual capital and Beijing a temporary one from 1425 to 1441. In 1441, the Yingzong Emperor ordered the word for provisional struck from the seals of Beijing's government, and the southern administration had to add Nanjing to its own seals.

  The Ming Xiaoling Mausoleum and the famous Porcelain Tower were among the city's Ming-era structures. A gigantic stele cut on the Yongle Emperor's orders still lies abandoned in the Yangshan Quarry, east of the walled city. Early Ming Nanjing also had worldwide connections. It was the home of Zheng He, who sailed the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and foreign dignitaries visited. A king from Borneo died during his visit to China in 1408. His Tomb of the King of Boni, with a spirit way and a tortoise stele, was discovered south of the walled city in Yuhuatai District in 1958 and has been restored.

  In the spring of 1644, Beijing fell first to the rebel forces of Li Zicheng and then to the Manchu-led Qing dynasty. In June 1644, the Ming prince Zhu Yousong was enthroned in Nanjing as the Hongguang Emperor, beginning what historians call the Southern Ming dynasty. Factional conflicts plagued his regime, and it could not mount effective resistance when the Qing army under the Manchu prince Dodo approached Jiangnan the next spring. Days after Yangzhou fell in late May 1645, the emperor fled, and local residents looted the Ming Palace. On the 6th of June, Dodo's troops approached, and Zhao, the Earl of Xincheng and commander of the garrison, promptly surrendered. The Manchus ordered all male residents to shave their heads in the Manchu queue style, took a large section of the city for the bannermen's cantonment, and occupied the former palace. Unlike Yangzhou, the city was spared mass murder and destruction.

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• 5. Rebellion and Treaties

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  The Treaty of Nanking, which ended the First Opium War in 1842, was signed in the city harbor aboard Royal Navy warships. The Qing had ruled the city since 1645, and foreign sources kept calling it Nanking throughout.

  Under the Qing, the territory once run from Nanjing as Nanzhili was first administered as Jiangnan, meaning the Area South of the Yangtze. Soon it was split into Right and Left governments based in Suzhou and Jiangning. At some point under the Qianlong Emperor, Jiangnan was fully divided into today's provinces of Anhui and Jiangsu. After 1723, a new Viceroy of Liangjiang supervised both provinces from a seat in Jiangning, where a Qing Army garrison was stationed. The Kangxi and Qianlong emperors visited several times on tours of the southern provinces.

  In the mid-19th century, the Taiping Rebellion secured the city and made it their capital. The rebels destroyed most of the former Ming imperial buildings, including the Porcelain Tower, which had been counted as one of the wonders of the world. Accounts differ on why the tower fell. One is that the Taipings wanted to stop a hostile faction from using it to observe and shell the city. Another is that they feared its geomantic properties. Both the Qing viceroy and the Taiping king lived in buildings later known as the Presidential Palace.

  When Qing forces led by Zeng Guofan retook the city in 1864, a massive slaughter followed. More than 100,000 people are estimated to have killed themselves or fought to the death. Since the rebellion began, Qing forces had allowed no rebels who spoke the local dialect to surrender, and they systematically slaughtered civilians inside the city.

  Virgil Hart, superintendent of the New York Methodist Mission Society, arrived in 1881. He bought land near the Southern Gate and the Confucian Temple, where he built the city's first Methodist church, a Western hospital and a boys' school. The hospital was later unified with Drum Tower Hospital. Later missionaries expanded the school into the University of Nanking and Medical School. The old mission property became No. 13 Middle School, the oldest continually used school grounds in the city.

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• 6. Republic and Massacre

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  The Xinhai Revolution led to the founding of the Republic of China in January 1912, with Sun Yat-sen as first provisional president and Nanjing as the new capital. The Qing Empire still controlled large regions in the north. The revolutionaries therefore asked Yuan Shikai to replace Sun in exchange for the abdication of Puyi, the last emperor. Yuan insisted that the capital move to Beijing, closer to his power base.

  In March 1927, the National Revolutionary Army captured Nanjing during its Northern Expedition. Foreign warships bombarded the city to protect foreign residents from rioting and looting. The Kuomintang under Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek made Nanjing the capital again, and the arrangement became internationally recognized once KMT forces took Beijing in 1928. The decade that followed is known as the Nanjing decade. The city carried deep symbolic weight, since the Ming had ruled from it and Sun's provisional government had sat there. Sun's body was brought to a grand mausoleum in the city to strengthen Chiang's legitimacy. Chiang had been born in neighboring Zhejiang, and the surrounding area strongly supported him.

  In 1927, the Nationalist government also proposed the Capital Plan, a scheme to rebuild the war-torn city as a modern capital. The result was a decade of extraordinary growth, with government buildings, houses and public infrastructure going up in large numbers. Nanjing reputedly became one of the most modern cities in China.

  Japan had invaded Manchuria in 1931, and in 1937 it began a full-scale invasion of China, starting the Second Sino-Japanese War, often considered a theater of World War II. Japanese troops occupied Nanjing in December and carried out the systematic and brutal Nanjing Massacre, also known as the Rape of Nanjing. Estimates, including those made by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East and the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal, put the death toll between 300,000 and 350,000. The city itself was severely damaged. The Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall was built in 1985 to commemorate the event.

  A few days before the city fell, the National Government relocated to Chongqing and carried on the resistance. In 1940, a collaborationist government led by Wang Jingwei, known as the Nanjing Regime or the Reorganized National Government of China, was set up in Nanjing as a rival to Chiang's government. After Japan surrendered, the KMT moved its central government back to Nanjing in 1946.

  In April 1949, Communist forces crossed the Yangtze River, and the People's Liberation Army captured Nanjing. The KMT government fell back to Canton, then Chongqing, then Chengdu, before retreating to Taiwan, where Taipei was proclaimed the temporary capital on the 10th of December. After the People's Republic was established in October 1949, Nanjing began as a province-level municipality. It was soon merged into Jiangsu and in 1952 replaced Zhenjiang as the provincial capital, a status it keeps today.

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• 7. Water, Weather and Bridges

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  The Yangtze River flows past the west side of Nanjing and then along its north, while the Ningzheng Ridge surrounds the north, east and south. The city sits 270 kilometers west-northwest of Shanghai and 900 kilometers south-southeast of Beijing. The river runs about 93 kilometers through the city, more than 300 kilometers from the sea. The Qinhuai River, called the mother river of Nanjing, flows from south to north through the main urban area before joining the Yangtze. Xuanwu Lake and Mochou Lake sit in the city center like two pearls. Water covers about 11 percent of the city.

  Nanjing is traditionally listed with Chongqing and Wuhan as one of the Three Furnaces along the Yangtze, for its perennially high summer temperatures. The record high is 43.0 degrees Celsius, set on the 13th of July 1934. Winter is another matter. January runs about 2 degrees colder than in London, even though Nanjing lies at 32°04'N and London at 51°30'N. It also runs 6 degrees colder than winter in Savannah, Georgia, which shares the same humid subtropical climate. The record low is minus 14.0 degrees, set on the 6th of January 1955. From mid-June to the end of July comes the meiyu, or plum rain, a season of mild showers and dampness. Annual precipitation averages 1144 millimeters.

  On the 2nd of December 2013, a dense wave of smog began across central and eastern China, stretching around 1200 kilometers. Nanjing's air quality index read severely polluted for five straight days and heavily polluted for nine. Officials blamed a lack of wind, car exhaust under low air pressure, and the coal-powered district heating in north China. Prevailing winds carried factory emissions, mostly sulfur dioxide, toward the east coast.

  The city has 1061 species of vascular plants, which is 64.7 percent of the total for Jiangsu, and forest covers 27.1 percent of its area. Protected animals include the Oriental White Crane and the finless porpoise. Underground, more than 40 kinds of minerals have been found, and the quality and reserves of strontium ore rank first in the country.

  The Port of Nanjing is the largest inland port in China, and it handled 191,970,000 tonnes of cargo in 2012. Its port area runs 98 kilometers and has 64 berths. In March 2004, the Longtan Containers Port Area opened with a capacity of one million containers. A 12.5-meter-deep channel lets 50,000-ton ocean ships reach the port directly.

  Work on the first Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge began in 1960, and it opened to traffic in 1968. At that time it was the only bridge across the Lower Yangtze in eastern China. Chinese engineers designed and built it themselves, after failed surveys by other nations and after relying on Soviet expertise and then rejecting it. The two-tier road and rail bridge spans 4,600 meters on the upper deck, with about 1,580 meters over the river itself. More bridges and several tunnels have followed. The Qixiashan bridge opened in 2012 with a longest span of 1,418 meters, and the Xianxin bridge opened in 2023 with a longest span of 1,760 meters.

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• 8. Scholars, Faith and Trade

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  As of 2021, Nanjing had 68 institutions of higher learning, including 13 double-first-class universities. Nanjing University ranks among the world's top 10 universities by the Nature Index. Students make up a larger share of the population than in any other large city in the country. The city has the fifth-largest scientific research output of any city in the world. As of 2024, the Nature Index placed it second in the world in earth and environmental sciences and third in chemistry and physical sciences. Xianlin University Town, in the northeast, gathers many higher education institutions and research facilities, with commercial services and transport close by.

  Painting and calligraphy run deep in the city's story. Six Dynasties masters such as Wang Xizhi, Wang Xianzhi, Zhang Sengyou, Lu Tanwei and Gu Kaizhi belong to its tradition. Han Xizai's Night Banquet is regarded as a masterpiece of ancient Chinese meticulous brushwork. In the Tang and Song dynasties, poets gathered in the city to compose verses recalling its luxurious past. Under the Ming and Qing, the Jiangnan Examination Hall made it the imperial examination center for the Jiangnan region. By 2019, Nanjing had 87 museums, including 77 state-owned and 10 non-state-owned. At the end of August 2020, it counted 137 calligraphy and painting academies, art museums and galleries.

  Nanjing has four major religions: Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity and Islam. The phrase 480 Temples in the Southern Dynasties recalls an age when the city was a center of Chinese Buddhist culture. The Jinling Carved Scriptures, a Buddhist publishing tradition, has engraving and printing skills now included in the world's intangible cultural heritage. Catholicism began to spread in the city more than 400 years ago, started by the scientist and missionary Matteo Ricci. Today the Amity Printing Company, the world's largest Bible printing company, is based in Nanjing.

  In 2025, the city's GDP was US$272 billion, and service industries produce about 60 percent of it. Finance, culture and tourism are the top three. Multinationals such as Siemens, Ericsson and Volkswagen have set up offices, while Huawei, ZTE and Lenovo keep key research institutes in the city. In 2019, Nanjing had 12 unicorn companies, which ranked fifth in China.

  Nanjing's first subway line opened on the 3rd of September 2005, making it the sixth city in mainland China with a subway. By 2019, the network had 12 lines, 208 stations and 449 kilometers of route. The Nanjing Hexi Tram began operating on the 1st of August 2014 and is described as the world's first inter-area contactless tram. Construction of Nanjing South Railway Station began on the 10th of January 2008, and it opened in 2011 as the largest railway station in Asia by floor area. The city plans to complete a 17-line metro and light-rail system by 2030.

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