Nanjing: China's Historic Capital City | Travel Guide

Nanjing served as the capital of China under six separate dynasties across more than 1800 years, concentrating political power at the junction where the Yangtze River turns northeast toward the East China Sea. The city's name translates directly as "Southern Capital," a designation formalized during the Ming Dynasty to distinguish it from Beijing, the "Northern Capital." Its position on the southern bank of the Yangtze, where the river narrows to approximately one kilometer in width, made it defensible and navigable, controlling waterborne traffic between the delta and the interior provinces. The first major capital period began in 229 CE when Sun Quan of the Eastern Wu kingdom established his seat here, then called Jianye, initiating a pattern where southern-based regimes chose this location when China fragmented. The city served as capital again under the Eastern Jin Dynasty (317-420 CE), then consecutively under the Song, Qi, Liang, and Chen dynasties of the Southern Dynasties period, accumulating nearly four centuries of continuous capital status between the fourth and sixth centuries.

The most architecturally consequential capital period began in 1368 when Zhu Yuanzhang, founding emperor of the Ming Dynasty, made Nanjing his imperial seat after overthrowing Mongol rule. He commissioned the Nanjing City Wall, completed in 1386, which remains the longest city wall structure ever built in China at 35.3 kilometers in circumference. The wall incorporated four concentric defensive rings, with the outermost perimeter originally extending 60 kilometers to enclose military installations and agricultural support zones. The main wall averaged 14 meters in height and ranged from 14 to 26 meters thick at the base, constructed from bricks each stamped with the name of the brickmaker, the overseer, and the production date to ensure accountability. Approximately two-thirds of the original Ming wall survives, including 25 of the original 35 kilometers and 13 of the original 13 city gates that were not dismantled during later urbanization. The Zhonghua Gate, the southern main entrance, consists of four successive portcullises creating a defensive gauntlet 129 meters deep, with 27 vaulted chambers inside the gate structure capable of garrisoning 3,000 soldiers and storing supplies for prolonged siege defense.

Zhu Yuanzhang's Nanjing remained the Ming capital for 53 years until his son, the Yongle Emperor, relocated the government to Beijing in 1421 to consolidate control over the northern frontier. Nanjing retained the designation "Southern Capital" and maintained duplicate governmental ministries as a backup capital throughout the remainder of the Ming and subsequent Qing dynasties. The city returned to capital status in 1853 when Hong Xiuquan, leader of the Taiping Rebellion, captured Nanjing and renamed it Tianjing, "Heavenly Capital," establishing it as the seat of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. The Taiping forces held Nanjing for 11 years, during which the city's population swelled to an estimated 1 million residents before Qing imperial forces recaptured it in 1864 following a siege that involved systematic starvation and artillery bombardment that destroyed approximately 80 percent of the city's pre-Taiping structures. The fall of Nanjing marked the effective end of the Taiping Rebellion, which had caused an estimated 20 to 30 million deaths across southern China between 1850 and 1864, making it one of the deadliest conflicts in human history.

Sun Yat-sen chose Nanjing as the symbolic location for his inauguration as provisional president of the Republic of China on January 1, 1912, the day after the Qing abdication. His tenure lasted 90 days before he ceded the presidency to Yuan Shikai in an effort to unify the fragmented republican movement, but the selection of Nanjing rather than Beijing signaled a deliberate break with imperial geography. Sun Yat-sen died in Beijing in 1925, and his remains were interred in Nanjing at a mausoleum constructed on the southern slope of Purple Mountain between 1926 and 1929. The Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum ascends the mountain via 392 steps divided into ten platforms, covering a vertical rise of 73 meters from the entrance archway to the sacrificial hall where a marble statue of Sun Yat-sen sits above a sealed burial chamber carved into the granite bedrock. The mausoleum complex covers 8 square kilometers and incorporated design elements from both Chinese imperial tombs and Western memorial architecture, with white granite and blue-glazed roof tiles representing the colors of the Kuomintang party flag.

The Kuomintang under Chiang Kai-shek formally established Nanjing as the capital of the Republic of China in 1927, ending the Beiyang government's control from Beijing and initiating the Nanjing Decade, a ten-year period of relative stability and modernization before the outbreak of full-scale war with Japan. The government constructed a new Presidential Palace complex, modernized the road network, and established Nanjing as the political center while Shanghai, located 300 kilometers downriver, functioned as the commercial and industrial center of the Yangtze Delta. This capital period ended on December 13, 1937, when Japanese forces captured Nanjing following a four-day assault. What followed became known internationally as the Nanjing Massacre, during which Japanese troops systematically killed Chinese prisoners of war, civilians, and former combatants over a six-week period. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East, convened in Tokyo after Japan's surrender, estimated that more than 200,000 people were killed, while the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal in 1946 concluded that more than 300,000 died. The Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall, opened in 1985 and expanded in 1995 and 2007, occupies a 7.4-hectare site in the Jiangdongmen district where mass graves containing the remains of more than 10,000 victims were excavated.

After Japan's surrender in 1945, Nanjing resumed its role as the Republic of China's capital until the Chinese Civil War shifted decisively in favor of the Communist forces. The People's Liberation Army captured Nanjing on April 23, 1949, marking the effective end of Kuomintang control over mainland China, though the government did not officially relocate to Beijing until October 1, 1949, when the People's Republic of China was proclaimed. Nanjing's status reverted from national capital to provincial capital of Jiangsu Province, a designation it retains currently. The city's population stood at approximately 1 million in 1949, recovered to 2.5 million by 1982, and reached 8.5 million in the 2020 census, with 9.3 million in the greater metropolitan area. This population now ranks Nanjing as the second-largest city in the Yangtze River Delta after Shanghai but ahead of Hangzhou and Suzhou.

The Confucius Temple area along the Qinhuai River represents Nanjing's oldest continuously inhabited district, originally developed during the Six Dynasties period and rebuilt during the Ming Dynasty as the city's commercial and cultural center. The Qinhuai River, a 110-kilometer tributary of the Yangtze, flows through central Nanjing in a series of channels and branches that once served as the primary transportation network for goods moving between the Yangtze and the city's markets. The Confucius Temple itself was first constructed in 1034 during the Song Dynasty and destroyed and rebuilt multiple times, most recently following Taiping-era destruction. The current structures date primarily from reconstructions completed between 1984 and 1991. The temple fronts onto Gongyuan Street, the location of the Jiangnan Examination Hall, where imperial civil service examinations for Jiangsu, Anhui, and surrounding provinces were administered beginning in 1168. The examination compound at its maximum extent contained 20,644 individual examination cells arranged in rows, each cell measuring approximately 1.2 meters wide by 1.5 meters deep, where candidates sat for three-day examination sessions that occurred every three years. Successful candidates at the provincial level could proceed to the metropolitan examination in Beijing, with the entire system producing an estimated 100,000 degree holders across the Ming and Qing dynasties before its abolition in 1905.

Purple Mountain, rising 448 meters immediately east of Nanjing's city center, contains a concentration of imperial, republican, and natural sites across its 31 square kilometers. Beyond the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum, the mountain's northern slope holds the Xiaoling Tomb of the Hongwu Emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang, completed in 1413. The tomb approach follows a 1,800-meter Sacred Way lined with stone statues of officials, military commanders, and animals including lions, camels, elephants, and qilin, each carved from single blocks of stone quarried from nearby deposits. The tomb mound itself rises 60 meters in diameter, with the underground burial chamber never excavated and presumed to remain sealed since 1398. The Ming Xiaoling Tomb was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2003 as an extension of the Imperial Tombs of the Ming and Qing Dynasties listing, recognized for establishing the architectural template that subsequent Ming and Qing imperial tombs followed, including the better-known tombs north of Beijing. Purple Mountain also contains the Linggu Temple complex, originally constructed in the 14th century, and the Beamless Hall, a 22-meter-high vaulted structure completed in 1381 entirely from interlocking bricks without wooden support beams, among the oldest surviving examples of pure brick vault construction in China.

The Yangtze River Bridge in Nanjing, completed in 1968, was the first bridge across the lower Yangtze constructed without foreign technical assistance, representing a priority engineering project during the early People's Republic period when Soviet advisors had withdrawn. The bridge consists of a double-deck structure carrying rail traffic on the lower level and road traffic on the upper level, with a total length of 4,588 meters spanning the river and approach viaducts. The main river span reaches 1,576 meters carried on nine piers sunk into the riverbed, with the deck standing 24 meters above the normal water level to allow shipping to pass beneath. Construction required driving 1,440 reinforced concrete piles with depths reaching 60 meters below the river surface to anchor the piers in stable substrata beneath the silt and sand layers. The bridge opened to rail traffic on October 1, 1968, and to road traffic on December 29, 1968, at which point it became a symbol of Chinese engineering capability frequently reproduced in propaganda imagery and postage stamps. Prior to the bridge's completion, all rail traffic between northern and southern China required ferrying across the Yangtze at Nanjing, creating a bottleneck that limited freight throughput along the Beijing-Shanghai corridor. A second Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge opened in 2001, followed by additional crossings as the city expanded, with a total of five bridges and four tunnels now connecting the northern and southern banks within the Nanjing metropolitan area.

Nanjing's role in the Yangtze Delta currently centers on education, research, and political administration rather than manufacturing or finance. The city hosts 53 universities and colleges, including Nanjing University, established in 1902, and Southeast University, founded in 1902 as Sanjiang Normal School. These institutions collectively enroll more than 800,000 students, giving Nanjing one of the highest ratios of university students to total population among Chinese cities. The concentration of research institutions has oriented Nanjing's economy toward software development, electronics, and pharmaceutical research, with the Nanjing New High-Tech Industrial Development Zone established in 1988 as one of the first provincial-level technology parks. The city's GDP reached 1.64 trillion yuan in 2021, approximately one-fifth of Shanghai's GDP but reflecting a different economic composition weighted toward government services and research rather than financial services and international trade.

The Presidential Palace complex in central Nanjing occupies a site that has served governmental functions since the Ming Dynasty, when it was the residence of the Prince of Han, a title granted to one of the Hongwu Emperor's sons. The compound was expanded during the Qing Dynasty to serve as the office of the Viceroy of Liangjiang, the governor-general responsible for administering Jiangsu, Anhui, and Jiangxi provinces from Nanjing. Hong Xiuquan used the complex as his palace during the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom period, during which it was expanded and rebuilt according to Taiping architectural principles. After the Taiping defeat, Qing officials restored portions of the complex, which then served as the provisional presidential palace when Sun Yat-sen was inaugurated in 1912. The Kuomintang government under Chiang Kai-shek expanded the complex again in the 1920s and 1930s, adding Western-style office buildings alongside traditional Chinese structures. The complex now functions as the China Modern History Museum, with exhibition spaces covering 90,000 square meters displaying artifacts and documents from the late Qing, Republican, and early People's Republic periods.