Who ruled Hangzhou?

Hangzhou stands at the head of Hangzhou Bay in eastern China, where the southern end of the Grand Canal meets the Qiantang River, and it is now the capital of Zhejiang province. Twice a royal seat, first of the tenth-century kingdom of Wuyue and then of the Southern Song dynasty, it was for a time probably the largest city on earth. Its West Lake, shaped over centuries by governors, poets and engineers, made it a byword for beauty in Chinese culture.

The region has a deep past. Rice farmers of the Hemudu culture lived about 100 kilometres to the south-east some seven thousand years ago, and the jade-working Liangzhu culture flourished around the present city about five thousand years ago. In 222 BCE the First Emperor of the Qin set up a county called Qiantang here. The Sui dynasty made it the seat of Hang prefecture in 589 and walled it soon afterwards, and the city took the prefecture's name. When the Grand Canal reached its full length in 609, Hangzhou sat at its southern terminus, linked by water to the north.

Under the Tang dynasty the poet Bai Juyi served as governor and rebuilt a ruined dyke on West Lake, easing a drought that had hurt local farmers. In the tenth century, when China broke apart into rival states, Hangzhou became the capital of Wuyue, a small kingdom dated by different sources to 907–978 or 923–997. Its rulers were generous patrons of Buddhist temples and art, and their court traded and exchanged envoys with Japan, Korea and the Khitan Liao.

In 1127 Jurchen armies captured Kaifeng, the capital of the Song dynasty, in the Jingkang incident. The surviving court fled south and, after moving between several cities, settled at Hangzhou in 1129. It was declared the capital in the 1130s, sources giving either 1132 or 1138, and renamed Lin'an. It was also known as Xingzai, the "place of temporary residence", a name that kept alive the hope of returning to Kaifeng, but once reconquest of the north looked unlikely the palace and walls were steadily enlarged.

The city grew far beyond its old ramparts as refugees, officials and soldiers poured in. Estimates of its population vary widely: the historian Jacques Gernet put it at well over a million by 1276, while an official count of 1270 listed some 186,330 households. Poets such as Su Shi, Lu You and Xin Qiji lived there, and Arab and Persian merchants settled in the city as sea trade flourished. Densely packed wooden houses made fire a constant danger; a blaze in 1208 burned for four days and destroyed more than 58,000 houses, and the government responded with watchtowers, signal systems and thousands of firefighting soldiers.

The armies of Kublai Khan besieged and took Hangzhou in 1276, three years before the last Song resistance collapsed. Unlike the Jurchen royal family, many of whom the Mongols had killed at Kaifeng in 1232, the Song imperial family and the city were spared, and under the Yuan dynasty it remained a great commercial and administrative centre, though the capital moved to Beijing. Foreign visitors were dazzled. Marco Polo, who is said to have come in the late thirteenth century, wrote that it was greater than any other city in the world, although his figures are clearly exaggerated, and Ibn Battuta, who arrived in 1345, described it as the largest city he had ever seen.

The port remained important until the middle of the Ming period, when its harbour slowly silted up. Under the Qing it housed an imperial garrison. The forces of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom occupied the city in 1856 and again in 1860, and the fighting that followed left it badly damaged.

After the fall of the Qing, rival warlord factions fought over the city until the Kuomintang took control in 1927. Japanese forces occupied it from 1937 to 1945, and the People's Liberation Army entered on 3 May 1949. Since the economic reforms that began in 1978 Hangzhou has become one of China's wealthiest cities, home to major technology companies, with a permanent population of about 12.5 million in 2023. It hosted the G20 summit in 2016 and the Asian Games in 2022. Its UNESCO World Heritage Sites are the West Lake cultural landscape, the Grand Canal and the archaeological ruins of Liangzhu City.