Jiāngníng

Jiāngníng was the county south of the Qínhuái River in the city later called Nánjīng. Its twin Shàngyuán lay to the north, and for nearly a thousand years after 917 the two counties governed one city between them. Under the Yuán the city was Jíqìng Route, the textile center of the southeast. Zhū Yuánzhāng took it in 1356, renamed it Yīngtiān, and in 1368 made it the capital of the Míng; from 1369 the city wall rose around a capital of some 700,000 people, 200,000 of them soldiers. In June 1376 a slice of Jiāngníng, with lands from Hézhōu and Chúzhōu, formed the new Jiāngpǔ County.

After the court moved to Beijing in 1421, Nánjīng kept its own six ministries and by the mid-Míng held perhaps 1.2 million people, the largest capital in the world. The Qīng took it in 1645 and renamed the prefecture Jiāngníng. It became the seat of the Liǎngjiāng governor-general, who ruled Jiāngsū, Ānhuī and Jiāngxī; the Jiāngníng treasurer also governed Jiāngsū's lands north of the river, and the Ānhuī treasurer's office sat here for long before it moved to Ānqìng in 1760. A Manchu garrison city rose on the east side of town.