The first stop of this Yangtze River Delta self-driving tour chose nanjing, because Nanjing is located in eastern China, the lower reaches of the Yangtze River, near the river, with a unique geographical location and extraordinary feng shui, is the country's first batch of historical and cultural cities, but also one of the important birthplaces of Chinese civilization. It has long been the political, economic and cultural center of southern China, an important gateway city for the development of the central and western regions driven by the radiation of the Yangtze River Delta, and an important node city for the strategic intersection of the eastern coastal economic belt and the Yangtze River economic belt.
As early as 100-1.2 million years ago, there were remnants of ancient human activities in Nanjing; 350,000-600,000 years ago, Nanjing ape people lived in the Tangshan area; archaeological discoveries have found more than 200 Neolithic sites in and around Nanjing for tens of thousands of years; 7,000 years ago, there was an agricultural civilization in the Qixia area of Nanjing; 6,000 years ago, neolithic primitive villages represented by the Northern Yinyangying culture; 4,000 years ago, there were dense primitive settlements in the Qinhuai River Basin; 3,000 years ago, Nanjing was a fiefdom of the Western Zhou In 571 BC, the State of Chu already had Tangyi here, which was the earliest place built in Nanjing since its historical records, and it was also the beginning of the founding of Nanjing. In 330 BC, the king of Chu Wei wanted to use the Yangtze River Graben in Nanjing as a barrier to plot the world, and built a city in stone and named it Jinlingyi, from which the name jinling originated. Nanjing is a capital city with a history of more than 7,000 years of civilization, nearly 2,600 years of city building history and nearly 500 years of capital history.
In history, Nanjing has suffered many wars, but it has repeatedly regained its prosperity from the smoke of rubble. When the Central Plains was occupied by foreign nationalities and the Chinese nation was about to suffer a catastrophe, the Han people would choose Nanjing as a place of recuperation, determined to go north and restore China, and Nanjing was also regarded as the rejuvenation of the Han nationality, which had a special status and value in Chinese history. Therefore, after comparing the four ancient capitals of Chang'an, Luoyang, Jinling (Nanjing) and Yanjing, some people proposed: "Among the four capitals, the prosperity of literature, the beauty of characters, the spiritual beauty of mountains and rivers, the grandeur of meteorology, and the close correlation with national tribulations, especially Jinling, is the most." ”
In 229 AD, Sun Quan, the Emperor of Wu during the Three Kingdoms period, established the capital here, and Nanjing began to rise, bringing China's political center out of the pattern of the Yellow River cultural plate and leading the development of the Yangtze River Basin and the entire southern region of China. Since then, the Eastern Jin Dynasty, the Southern Dynasty, the Song, Qi, Liang, and Chen have successively built capitals here, so Nanjing has the name of "The Ancient Capital of the Six Dynasties", when the Nanjing Imperial Palace was the largest and most magnificent palace in China, and the architectural shape of the Imperial Palace influenced the shape of the palace construction in later generations, and its influence was far-reaching.
At that time, Nanjing was the largest city in the world at that time, the first city in the world with a population of more than one million, and was called the "two major centers of classical civilization in the world" along with the ancient Roman city. The culture of the Southern Dynasty, represented by Nanjing, has had an extremely far-reaching impact on human history. As early as the Six Dynasties period, the "Maritime Silk Road East China Sea Route" centered on Nanjing has been opened, Nanjing as an international wharf through the river to the sea, tens of thousands of Chinese and foreign ships moored, there has been a prosperous scene of "four seas circulating, all countries meeting" and "boats and ships inheriting the road, merchants and envoys", Nanjing has also become an important central city of China's Maritime Silk Road, and its cultural radiation has reached the entire East Asian region.
In 1356, Zhu Yuanzhang captured Nanjing and renamed it Ying Tianfu. With the establishment of the Ming Dynasty in 1368, Nanjing once again became the political, economic and cultural center of China. The Nanjing Ming City Wall, which took 27 years to build, was the largest city wall in the world at that time, and the Nanjing Forbidden City, built according to the celestial signs and ritual system, was the largest palace complex in the medieval world, and its architectural shape and layout became the blueprint for the design of the later Beijing City and the Ming Dynasty Palace. It is no wonder that after traveling to China, the Western missionary Matteo Ricci praised: "Seeing the great city of Nanjing, it is inevitable to be dazzling... The city of Nanjing in the Ming Dynasty was extremely majestic, comparable to any of the largest capitals in Europe in the sixteenth century." Hongwu, the founding emperor of the dynasty, made it a miracle, and everything that could be seen in the East could not be matched. (Excerpt from Matteo Ricci's Commentary)
Modern Nanjing also has its history of humiliation, and the first unequal treaty in Modern Chinese history, the Treaty of Nanking, was signed in Nanjing, and China's modern history began. In 1853, the Taiping Army conquered Nanjing with the elimination of foreign rule as one of the basis and legitimacy of mobilization, established the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, and renamed Tianjing. This was the first peasant war in China's history that arose in the south and affected all of China, and it was also a peasant war of unprecedented scale in the history of the world.
On New Year's Day 1912, the Provisional Government of the Republic of China was established in Nanjing, with Sun Yat-sen as the provisional president. On April 18, 1927, the National Government of Nanjing was established, making Nanjing the capital. The decade from 1927 to 1937, when the capital of Nanjing, was known as China's Golden Decade, during which Nanjing carried out large-scale capital construction, laying a good foundation for the development of Nanjing's modern city.
During the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, on December 13, 1937, Nanjing fell, and the Japanese army carried out a large-scale and inhumane massacre of more than 40 days in Nanjing and nearby areas, which is known in history as the "Nanjing Massacre". At 9 o'clock on September 9, 1945, the ceremony of surrendering in the Chinese Theater of World War II was held in the auditorium of the Central Army Officer School in Nanjing, and Japan announced its unconditional surrender. In May 1946, the Nationalist government returned to Nanjing.
Nanjing is also an important national science and education cultural center, since ancient times is a city of reverence for culture and education, with the "Heavenly Hub" and "the first study in southeast China", more than half of China's titles in the Ming and Qing dynasties are from the Nanjing Jiangnan Gongyuan. As of 2020, there are 68 colleges and universities of various types in Nanjing, including 12 double-first-class universities, 10 111 planned universities, 8 211 universities, and 81 academicians of the two academies, all second only to Beijing and Shanghai.
Coming to Jiangnan, you have to go to Jinling City, the ancient capital of the Six Dynasties with a long history and outstanding people.