A little history

Toward the end of the Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907), a nomadic people called the Qidan (or Khitan, from which Polo's name for China, Cathay, is derived) came to power on the steppe. During the early years of the Song Dynasty (AD 960-1279) the Qidan pushed south of theGreat Wall.capturing territory that included the area of modern Beijing. They made the city their southern capital, calling it Nanjing (literally "Southern Capital") or Yanjing ("Swallow Capital" ). The Qidan founded a Chinese-style dynasty called the Liao, which forced the Song to pay a hefty annual tribute and to recognize its emperor as a co-equal Son of Heaven.

The Qidan Liao were in turn conquered in the early 12th century by another nomadic people called the Nüzhen (or Jurchen), who began as a vassal tribe under the Liao but were encouraged by the Song Chinese to ally against the Qidan. In a series of bold campaigns they swept southward from their Manchurian homeland and defeated the Liao in 1125 while their ostensible Song allies merely dithered. Emboldened by the apparent weakness of the Chinese, the Nüzhen went on to sweep the Song Dynasty out of North China. They, too, made their capital in modern Beijing: They moved their seat of government there in AD 1153 and called it Zhongdu (Central Capital). Zhongdu was a large walled city that boasted a population of close to one million at its height.

Zhongdu fell to the Mongols under Chinggis (Genghis) Khan in AD 1215. The Mongols, who under the reign of Chinggis' grandson Kubilai created a Chinese dynasty called Yuan, called the city Dadu (Great Capital). But the city was better known in the West as Cambaluc, the Venetian traveler Marco Polo's transliteration of the Mongol name Khanbalig, or City of the Grand Khan. When the Mongols completed their conquest of the Southern Song in AD 1279, Dadu (that is, Beijing) became the capital of the entirety of China for the first time. The Yuan capital at Dadu was grandly conceived and methodically planned, with broad, rectangular blocks laid out in the checkerboard pattern that still characterizes the city.

In 1368, an itinerant monk and (his detractors allege) former brigand chieftain named Zhu Yuanzhang led his rebel forces to victory over the Mongols and founded the Ming Dynasty. He built his capital at Nanjing in modern Jiangsu Province. Soon after the death of the dynastic founder, his brother, the Prince of Yan, usurped the Dragon Throne from Zhu Yuanzhang's young son. He moved the capital north to his home base in modern Beijing and ruled from there as the Yongle Emperor. It was the usurper Yongle who bequeathed the name Beijing to the city; earlier, when the old Mongol capital had fallen to the Ming, it had been renamed Beiping. The Yongle Emperor began construction of the Imperial Palace in 1406, which was completed in 1420. The new Ming capital was, like modern Beijing, centered on this splendid Forbidden City--home to the Celestial Emperor, his consorts, his eunuchs, and his ministers. The emperor formally transferred the capital to Beijing in 1421; Nanjing remained a secondary capital.

The choice of Beijing as the Ming capital was chiefly a strategic decision. Even after their ouster from China proper, the Mongols still posed a serious threat to the security of the Middle Kingdom, and Beijing, situated in the northern reaches of the Empire, was the ideal location from which defensive efforts--and the occasional offensive foray onto the steppe-- could be coordinated. The Ming capital was surrounded by a massive city wall (part of which still stands today) which testifies to the ever-present danger of barbarian invasion. The Manchu Qing Dynasty was founded in 1644 after the last Ming emperor was dethroned in an internal rebellion. Manchu armies poured in from the Northeast to fill what was essentially a power vacuum. The Manchus enlarged the Forbidden City, and built enormous imperial pleasure-gardens in the city's outskirts. The most famous of these is Yuanmingyuan, the Old Summer Palace, which was razed by British and French troops during the Second Opium War in 1861.

Beijing was the nominal capital of China through much of the Republican Period, which followed the revolution of October 1911. In truth, power had devolved into the hands of warring militarists, who fought among themselves for control of Beijing in order to claim a political legitimacy none in fact possessed

Out of the chaotic backdrop of the Warlord Period (1916-1928), Beijing emerged as the focus of cultural and political foment embodied in the May Fourth Movement (named for a watershed patriotic, anti-warlord student march that took place on May 4, 1919). The radical reassessment of traditional culture carried out by the young intellectuals of the May Fourth period came to be known as the "New Culture Movement." Rallying to calls for science, democracy, gender equality, and a new vernacular literature, the "New Youth" took on the Confucian family system and the authoritarian habits of mind it allegedly cultivated. The Chinese Communist Party was forged in this crucible; one of its founding members was the the tall, round-faced Hunanese assistant librarian at Peking University, Mao Zedong.

Like much of China, Beijing came under Japanese occupation after the Second World War broke out in 1937. The city had precious little time to recover following the Japanese surrender, and was soon swept up in the Civil War between the Nationalist Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party. The People's Liberation Army entered the city on January 31, 1949, and it was from Beijing's Tiananmen Square that Mao Zedong proclaimed the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1, 1949.