Beijing is first mentioned in history in the chronicles of the Zhou Dynasty’s conquest of the Shang Dynasty in the 11th century BC. A walled Chinese village called the ji was built in the southeast suburbs of contemporary Beijing.
For several centuries before the unification of China in 221 BC, Beijing was the capital of the State of Yan.
In the 1272 the Mongol leader Kublai Khan built the city of Dadu on the site.
He made Dadu the capital of China. Kublai Khan rebuilt the city, founding the modern city and made it capital of his domains. After he completed the conquest of south China, Beijing became, for the first time in history, the capital of the whole of China.
The city was renamed Beijing in the early 1400s. It was chosen as the capital of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) in 1421, which it remained during the Qing dynasty (1644 – 1911/12).
The city suffered heavy damage when it was occupied by European forces in 1860 and 1900. It was known as Peking in the United States and other Western countries until the early 1980s.
History of Beijing
