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Khanbaliq
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Khanbaliq or Dadu refers to a city which is now Beijing, the current capital of the People's Republic of China. The city was called Dadu or Tatu (??, pinyin: Dàdu, Wade-Giles: Ta-tu), meaning "great capital" or "grand capital" in Chinese, the name for the capital of the Yuan Dynasty founded by Kublai Khan in China, and was called Daidu by the Mongols, which was a transliteration directly from the Chinese. It is known as Khanbaliq(???), also spelled as Khanbalikh in Turkic languages, meaning "Great residence of the Khan", and Marco Polo wrote of it as Cambaluc or Cambuluc.
r the name Zhongdu (??, "central capital", pinyin: Zhongdu) the city had earlier served as the capital of the Jin Dynasty, but was burned down in 1215 by Mongol forces.
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Encyclopedia
Khanbaliq or Dadu refers to a city which is now Beijing, the current capital of the People's Republic of China. The city was called Dadu or Tatu (??, pinyin: Dàdu, Wade-Giles: Ta-tu), meaning "great capital" or "grand capital" in Chinese, the name for the capital of the Yuan Dynasty founded by Kublai Khan in China, and was called Daidu by the Mongols, which was a transliteration directly from the Chinese. It is known as Khanbaliq(???), also spelled as Khanbalikh in Turkic languages, meaning "Great residence of the Khan", and Marco Polo wrote of it as Cambaluc or Cambuluc.
History
Under the name Zhongdu (??, "central capital", pinyin: Zhongdu) the city had earlier served as the capital of the Jin Dynasty, but was burned down in 1215 by Mongol forces. In 1264, in preparation to establish the Yuan Dynasty, Kublai Khan decided to rebuild this city as his new capital. Liu Bingzhong was appointed as the supervisor of its construction, and one of the main people who designed and led the construction was Yeheidie'erding (Amir al-Din). The construction of the walls of the city began in the same year, while the imperial palace was built from 1274 onwards. The design of Dadu followed the Confucianism classic Zhouli (??, "rites of Zhou"), 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.
After the establishment of the Yuan Dynasty in 1271, Kublai Khan renamed the city to Dadu (??, "great capital", or Ta-tu in Wade-Giles) in 1272, and it officially became the capital of the Yuan Dynasty, though some constructions in the city were not completed until 1293. The previous seat of Kublai Khan, Shangdu, became the summer capital of the Yuan. During the reign of Kublai Khan in the late 1200s, Marco Polo arrived Dadu and Shangdu, and is said to stay serving Kublai 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 Dadu, the capital of the Yuan Dynasty. The last Yuan emperor fled north to Shangdu, and Zhu Yuanzhang declared the founding of the Ming Dynasty after razing the Yuan palaces in Dadu to the ground.
Aftermath
After the fall of the Yuan Dynasty in 1368, the city was renamed Beiping (??, pingyin: Beipíng) by the Ming Dynasty in the same year, and Shuntian prefecture was established in the area around the city. After the enthronement of Yongle Emperor of Ming, he extended the city and commissioned the building of the Forbidden City within the walls of the Imperial city of Yuan's Dadu. He renamed the city to Beijing (??, pinyin: Beijing, or ‘Peking’ in an obsolete romanization), which lasted until the present day - except for a short time in Republican China where it was again known as Beiping. Remains of parts of the ancient walls of Dadu, 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 (??, literally, the 'earth wall').
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