Khanbaliq

Khanbaliq or Cambuluc, also Kaan-baligh ("Great residence of the Khan") is the ancient Mongol name^[1] for the city that stood at the present location of Beijing, the current capital of the People's Republic of China. It was known in the Chinese language as Dadu or Tatu (大都 pinyin: Dàdū), meaning "great metropolis" or "great capital".

Under the name Zhongdu (中都, "central capital" pinyin: Zhōngdū) the city had earlier served as the capital of the Jin Dynasty, but was burned down in 1215 by Mongol forces. In 1264, Kublai Khan decided to rebuild this city as his new capital, and it officially became the capital of the Yuan Dynasty (which was established in 1271) in 1272. The construction of the walls of the city began in 1264 and was completed in 1292, while the imperial palace was built from 1274 onwards. The design of Khanbaliq followed the book Zhouli, in that the rules of “9 vertical axis, 9 horizontal axis”, “palaces in the front, markets in the rear”, “left ancestral worship, right god worship” were taken into consideration. It was broad in scale, strict in planning and execution, complete in equipment..^[2]

Marco Polo stayed in the city in the late 1200s. After the fall of the Yuan Dynasty in 1368, the city was rebuilt by the Ming and renamed Shuntian (順天 pinyin: Shùntiān), and later Beijing (北京 pinyin: Běijīng, or ‘Peking’ in an obsolete romanization) - except for a short time in Republican China where it was known as Beiping (北平 pinyin: Běipíng). Remains of parts of the ancient walls of Khanbaliq, which lie slightly to the north of the later Ming Dynasty walls, are still extant in modern-day Beijing and are known as the Tucheng (土城 literally, the 'earth wall'). ^[3]

Khanbaliq is where Kublai Khan's court was. Marco, Maffeo, and Niccolo Polo arrived there and stayed serving Khan for seventeen years.

In 1368, Zhu Yuanzhang, the founder of the Ming Dynasty and future Hongwu Emperor, made his imperial ambitions known by sending an army toward the Yuan capital. The last Yuan emperor fled north to Shangdu and Zhu declared the founding of the Ming Dynasty after razing the Yuan palaces to the ground.^[4]

Ming emperor Yongle commissioned the building of the Forbidden City within the walls of Kublai's Imperial city. The Forbidden City was built without the thought of expense, using imported exquisite timber. However, the cost of continually building the Forbidden City and rebuilding any buildings that had been burned down, added to the tax strain the Ming dynasty emperors placed on the civilians to support their decadent life style.

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