Chinese Architecture in an Age of Turmoil, 200-600 by Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt

Author:Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt [Steinhardt, Nancy Shatzman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780824838225
Google: Yh_HDwAAQBAJ
Published: 2014-12-31T06:25:36.040634+00:00

CHAPTER 13

The Chinese Imperial City and Its Architecture, Ming and Qing

Beijing has been called the greatest city on earth and the most important city in China. The claims reflect the almost universal recognition of the city since the time of Marco Polo and the fact that more has been written about Beijing than about any other Chinese city. Ripley’s Believe It or Not claimed that the Great Wall to its north could be seen from outer space long before satellite photographs confirmed what every Chinese first-grader knows: the walls of the Ming-Qing capital are a vertical rectangle juxtaposed above a horizontal rectangle (figure 13.1).1 Together with Xi’an, Beijing is the cannot-be-missed city of any tourist itinerary, but unlike Xi’an, it is easy to choose the two monuments that cannot be missed: the walled city and the Great Wall to its north.

Beijing is not China’s oldest walled city, but it is one of the few with evidence of habitation in ca. 750,000 BP: Peking Man (Homo erectus pekinensis) was identified at Zhoukoudian in the 1920s. The oldest city remains date to the Shang dynasty; the state of Yan was built there in the Warring States period (see figure 2.3b). The greatness and importance of Beijing are best understood in the context of the three millennia of capital city building that preceded it, including the capitals of Liao and Jin and Yuan, which became part of it (see figure 11.6). Upon the fall of the Yuan dynasty, Beijing’s continuous history as a capital was lost for thirty years.

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