Who ruled Nanjing?

Nanjing lies on the south bank of the lower Yangtze River, about 300 kilometres upstream from the sea, protected by the Purple Mountain to the east and by hills and lakes around it. Its position, controlling the great river and the rich lands of the delta, made it the natural capital of southern China whenever the country was divided, and its name means simply "southern capital". It has served as the seat of many dynasties and governments, and its history alternates between periods of brilliance as a capital and episodes of terrible destruction.

A fortified settlement stood here as early as the end of the second millennium BCE, and by the fourth century BCE, under the kingdom of Chu, the place was known as Jinling. Its first great age began in 229 CE, when Sun Quan, ruler of the Wu kingdom during the Three Kingdoms period, made it his capital under the name Jianye. After northern China fell to non-Chinese invaders, the Jin dynasty refounded its court here in 317 as Jiankang, and for almost three centuries the city was the capital of the Eastern Jin and the four Southern Dynasties that followed. It became one of the largest cities in the world, a centre of Buddhism, poetry and calligraphy where refugees from the north preserved Chinese court culture.

When the Sui dynasty reunified China in 589 it ordered the city razed, and for centuries Nanjing was a regional centre rather than a capital, apart from a brief revival as capital of the Southern Tang kingdom (937 to 975). Mongol forces took it in 1275. In 1356 the rebel leader Zhu Yuanzhang captured it, and in 1368 he proclaimed the Ming dynasty there as the Hongwu Emperor. He surrounded it with a city wall more than 30 kilometres long, much of which still stands, and the dockyards on the river later built ships for the voyages of Zheng He. The Yongle Emperor moved the main capital to Beijing in 1421, though Nanjing kept a secondary court.

Under the Qing dynasty Nanjing was the seat of the viceroys who governed the wealthy lower Yangtze provinces. The Treaty of Nanking, signed on a British warship off the city in 1842, ended the First Opium War and opened Chinese ports to foreign trade. In 1853 the Taiping rebels captured Nanjing and made it the capital of their Heavenly Kingdom; when imperial forces retook it in 1864, at the end of the Taiping Rebellion, much of the city was destroyed and many of its people killed.

After the 1911 revolution Sun Yat-sen was inaugurated in Nanjing as provisional president of the new Republic of China on 1 January 1912. In 1927 the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek made the city its capital, and Sun was buried in a vast mausoleum on Purple Mountain in 1929. Japanese troops captured Nanjing in December 1937 and over the following weeks killed very large numbers of civilians and prisoners and committed mass rape; estimates of the dead vary widely, from tens of thousands to the figure of 300,000 used in China, and the massacre remains a sensitive issue between China and Japan. A Japanese-backed puppet government sat in Nanjing from 1940 to 1945.

The Nationalists returned in 1946, but Communist forces took the city in April 1949, and the new People's Republic made Beijing its capital. Nanjing became the capital of Jiangsu province. Today it is a major industrial, university and transport centre with a population of more than 9 million, and a leading city of the Yangtze delta in China.