Kūnmíng

Kunming stands at the northern end of Dian Lake, in the fertile basins of the Yunnan plateau. Once called Shanchan, it had become a prosperous city of merchants and craftsmen under the Dali kingdom. After the Mongol conquest the governor Sayyid Ajall Shams al-Din made it the seat of the new Yunnan province, building a Confucian school, a Buddhist temple and two mosques there, and repairing the waterworks of the lake. Marco Polo, travelling through the province, passed through the city he called Yachi. Roads led east toward the Chinese interior and west toward Dali.

After the Ming conquest of Yunnan in 1381, the city became the seat of Yunnan Prefecture. General Mu Ying began building a brick-walled city in 1382, completed four years later; its gates, temples and offices gave the provincial capital a new shape. Northeast of the walls, the governor Chen Yongbin cast a bronze hall at the Taihe Palace on Mingfeng Mountain in the early 1600s, modelled on the Golden Hall of Wudang. In 1637 another governor had it moved to Jizu Mountain, and Wu Sangui put up a new one on the old site in 1671.

The fall of the Ming brought another court to Kunming. In 1656 the general Li Dingguo escorted the Southern Ming Yongli Emperor here, and the emperor used an examination compound as his palace until Qing armies drove him out three years later. Wu Sangui, who then ruled Yunnan for the Qing, rose against them in 1673, and his grandson held Kunming until Qing troops entered the city in 1681. In the eighteenth century the city was the seat of the Yun-Gui governor-general, and Yunnan copper moved through it to the mints.