Who ruled Kaifeng?

Kaifeng stands on the floodplain just south of the Yellow River in east-central Henan province, China. As Bianliang or Dongjing, the Eastern Capital, it was the seat of the Northern Song dynasty from 960 to 1127 and one of the largest and richest cities in the world. Counted among the Eight Ancient Capitals of China, it has been wrecked and rebuilt again and again after wars and Yellow River floods.

In the Spring and Autumn period there were two small cities nearby: Yi, built by the state of Wey, and Qifeng, built by the lords of Zheng. In 361 BCE King Hui of Wei moved his capital to Yi and built the city of Daliang, after which his state was often called Liang. When Qin conquered Wei, Daliang was wrecked and shrank to a market town called Junyi. Under the Han, Emperor Jing changed the name of Qifeng to Kaifeng to avoid using a character from his own personal name.

The city's fortunes followed its waterways. In 202 the warlord Cao Cao repaired a canal that linked the area to the Huai and Yangtze rivers, and early in the seventh century the town, now called Bianzhou after the Bian River, was joined to the Grand Canal and became a major commercial hub. Under the Tang the original Qifeng was gradually abandoned.

During the Five Dynasties period four of the short-lived northern regimes, from the Later Liang to the Later Zhou, ruled from Bianzhou, and in 955 the Later Zhou began a great outer city. When the Song dynasty replaced the Later Zhou in 960, it kept the city as its capital under the name Dongjing. Standing where four major canals met, it reached its height in the eleventh century, enclosed by three rings of walls. Population estimates vary; one figure puts it at over 400,000 inside and outside the walls, while others suggest 600,000 to 700,000, and some historians believe that in the early twelfth century no city in the world was larger.

A memoir written after its fall, the Dongjing Menghua Lu, describes markets that ran day and night, taverns, and theatres where crowds watched storytellers, puppets and acrobats, and Zhang Zeduan's scroll painting Along the River During the Qingming Festival is often taken to depict the city's riverside. The engineer and statesman Su Song built a water-driven astronomical clock tower there, and the Iron Pagoda of 1049 still stands as the city's oldest landmark.

In 1127, in the Jingkang incident, the Jurchen armies of the Jin dynasty captured the city and carried the Song emperors, their family and officials north as prisoners. A surviving prince, Zhao Gou, re-established the Song court in the south, which never returned. The Jin installed a puppet state called Great Qi in the city from 1130 to 1138 and then ruled it directly. Under Mongol pressure the Jin moved their own court to Kaifeng in 1214, relying on the Yellow River for defence, but after a siege of about ten months the city fell to the Mongols in 1233 and was looted.

Under the Yuan it was capital of a large province. Red Turban rebels held it briefly in 1358 and 1359, and in 1368 the forces of the Ming dynasty took it and restored the name Kaifeng. It then served for centuries as capital of Henan province.

Its site on the Yellow River floodplain made Kaifeng extremely vulnerable. Five major floods struck between 1375 and 1416, and in 1642, during the third rebel siege of the city at the end of the Ming, the Ming army turned the Yellow River on the rebels to drown them; the city was submerged and, by one account, only 30,000 of its 370,000 people survived there. Kaifeng was rebuilt in 1662 and again after a flood in 1841, which gave the old town its present shape.

The city was long home to a Jewish community, the Kaifeng Jews, as well as a large Muslim population known for its women's mosques. Japanese troops occupied Kaifeng from 1938 to 1945, during the Second Sino-Japanese War, and communist forces captured it in 1948. It lost its role as provincial capital to Zhengzhou in 1954. Today Kaifeng is a prefecture-level city of China with about 1.7 million people in its urban districts.