Shàngyuán

In 1356 Zhū Yuánzhāng took Jíqìng, renamed it Yìngtiān and made it the base of his war on the Yuán. When he proclaimed the Míng in 1368 it became for the first time the capital of all China, and the next year he began a vast new city wall around it, with his palace rising in Shàngyuán, the half of the city north of the Qínhuái River. Some 700,000 people lived here in the early Míng, 200,000 of them garrison troops. Its primacy lasted barely half a century: his son Zhū Dì, Prince of Yān, took the city from his nephew in 1402, and in 1421 moved the court to Běijīng, leaving Yìngtiān a secondary capital with six ministries of its own. When Běijīng fell in 1644, a Southern Míng court was set up here. The Qīng took it in 1645, renamed it Jiāngníng, and made it the seat of the viceroy who governed Jiāngsū, Ānhuī and Jiāngxī.