We know that the capital is the economic and political center of a country, and the impact is very significant. At a smaller extent, it affects the rise and fall of a land, and at a large extent, it affects the national fortunes of a country. In the eighteenth year of Yongle (1420), Ming Chengzu built a rectangular city in Beijing, 961 meters long from north to south and 753 meters wide from east to west, and subsequently moved the capital from Nanjing to Beijing, which consolidated the territory of the north and consolidated the political structure, and Beijing is still the capital of China.
However, before Zhu Di, the founding emperor of the Ming Dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang, also built a palace, the total area of this palace, such as the current Forbidden City is still 12,000 square meters large, if the palace is completed, then there is no doubt that the political center of the Ming Dynasty will move here, and even Zhu Di will not build another Forbidden City to move the capital to Beijing, and the evolution of history will also undergo a great change. This unprecedentedly large palace was the Ming Zhongdu, which was built in the second year of Hongwu (1369).
In 1368, Zhu Yuanzhang ascended the throne as emperor at Yingtianfu. In July, the Ming Dynasty's various armies reached Tianjin, and in August, the Ming army advanced into Dadu. Emperor Yuan Shun fled, and the Ming Dynasty gained dominion over the areas within the Great Wall. But the whole country has endured more than a century of rule by the Yuan Dynasty, and Zhu Yuanzhang hopes to get cultural belonging in addition to territorial belonging.
Therefore, choosing a new kingdom and imperial palace was his first thing to do to make up for the loss of national pride, and Zhu Yuanzhang hoped that the imperial palace of the Ming Dynasty would surpass all the palaces built before. First of all, Zhu Yuanzhang gave two places on the site of the palace construction, one was Zhu Yuanzhang's Ying Tianfu Nanjing, which he called emperor, and the other was his hometown of Fengyang.
Then Zhu Yuanzhang thought that Nanjing was too far away from the Central Plains to control the whole country, because in September of the second year of Hongwu (1369), Zhu Yuanzhang ordered Li Shanchang to build the capital city in Fengyang under the auspices of Li Shanchang, and after the design was completed, Yu Hongwu began to move the land in the third year. But soon there was a problem.
Because most of the countries in China's history were built on the basis of the previous dynasty, it takes a lot of capital investment to blaze new trails, but at the end of the Yuan and the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, because of successive conquests, the treasury was empty, where is there so much money invested in the construction of the palace? What's more, the project of this Mingzhong capital is extremely huge, even more than any imperial city in history.
But Zhu Yuanzhang did not think about it so much, and he could not build an imperial city after the Jiangshan had been defeated? In order to build this Mingzhong capital, almost the national materials were mobilized, and the materials used were the highest, such as the construction wall was first used as a foundation of white jade and then built a large city brick, and lime, tung oil and glutinous rice juice were used as pulp.
More than a million craftsmen, men, prisoners, immigrants, and troops were mobilized, but in the eighth year of Hongwu (1375), this huge project suddenly stopped. The Records of the Ming Dynasty records: "In the beginning, the Shang wanted to build two capitals like the Zhou and Han systems, and then it was at the cost of labor. ”
The history books do not record a clear reason, but it is likely that it was due to a shortage of funds. In short, this project, which is more than 12,000 square meters larger than the Forbidden City in Beijing, has been a huge project and has become a famous historical "rotten tail project". After Zhu Di succeeded to the throne, he moved the capital to Beijing. And Far away in Anhui Fengyang is gradually forgotten by history, more than 600 years later today is still a small county, if this Mingzhong is built, I don't know what it looks like today?