Who ruled Beijing?

Beijing stands at the northern tip of the North China Plain, where the flat farmland meets the mountains that separate China from the Mongolian steppe and Manchuria. For most of its history that position made it a frontier city, a garrison facing the nomads. From the tenth century onwards it made it a capital for dynasties that came from beyond the frontier, and from 1272 it has served, with two interruptions, as the capital of China.

The region has a very long human past: fossils of Homo erectus, the so-called Peking Man, were found in caves at Zhoukoudian south-west of the city and date back several hundred thousand years. The first recorded city, Ji, lay in what is now south-western Beijing. In the first millennium BCE it became the capital of the state of Yan, one of the warring states of the late Zhou period, until it fell to Qin in 226 BCE during Qin's wars of unification.

For the next thousand years Ji, later called Youzhou, was a provincial and military centre on the northern border. Its armies guarded the frontier, and in 755 the general An Lushan launched from here the An Lushan Rebellion, which nearly destroyed the Tang dynasty.

In 938 the Khitan rulers of the Liao dynasty obtained the city and made it their southern capital. The Jurchen Jin dynasty, who overthrew the Liao, made it their main capital, Zhongdu, in 1153. Genghis Khan's Mongols took and burned Zhongdu in 1215. Kublai Khan then built a new city just to the north-east, Dadu, known to foreigners as Khanbaliq, and in 1272 made it the capital of his Yuan dynasty. Once the Yuan completed the conquest of the Song in 1279, the whole of China was ruled from the city for the first time. Marco Polo's account made its splendour famous in Europe.

Ming armies captured Dadu in 1368. The new dynasty ruled from Nanjing and renamed the old city Beiping, "the north pacified". His son, the Yongle Emperor, who had governed the region as a prince, renamed it Beijing, "northern capital", and moved the court back in 1421. He built the Forbidden City, the walls and the Temple of Heaven, and later Ming rulers added an outer wall to the south. In 1644 the rebel Li Zicheng took Beijing and the last Ming emperor hanged himself; within weeks Manchu armies entered the city and made it the capital of the Qing dynasty. The Qing emperors added great gardens and palaces to the north-west.

The nineteenth century brought humiliation. British and French troops occupied the city in 1860 and burned the Old Summer Palace, and in 1900 foreign armies relieved the siege of the legation quarter during the Boxer uprising and looted the city. After the fall of the Qing in 1912 Beijing remained the seat of the republic's weak central government, and students demonstrated there on 4 May 1919 in a protest that gave its name to a wider movement of cultural and political renewal. The Nationalists moved the capital to Nanjing in 1928, and Japan occupied the city from 1937 to 1945.

On 1 October 1949 Mao Zedong proclaimed the People's Republic of China from Tiananmen, the gate in front of the Forbidden City, and Beijing became the capital again. Much of the old city wall was demolished in the following decades and Tiananmen Square was greatly enlarged. In 1989 student-led protests in the square were crushed by the army on 4 June. Since the economic reforms the city has been rebuilt on a vast scale, hosting the Summer Olympics in 2008 and the Winter Olympics in 2022. Beijing municipality now has more than 21 million people and is the political and cultural centre of the country.