PEKING (officially renamed PEIPING in 1928), the most re nowned of all the cities of China, the capital of the Chinese Empire from about 1267 to 1368 and again from 1421 to the fall of the Manchu Dynasty in 1911, and of the Republic of China from 1911 to 1928. Peking is situated in lat. 54' N. and long. 116° 28' E. at the northern apex of the alluvial Plain of North China, where converge the narrow lowland passage from the Man churian steppes via Shan-hai-kwan (the "Gate between the moun tains and the sea"), and the easiest routes from the Mongolian pla teau through the bold scarps which intervene between it and the plain. It is separated by 90 miles of level agricultural country from the coasts of the Gulf of Pe-Chihli, but westwards and northwards the land begins to rise rapidly to the hills which are clearly visible from the walls of the city. It is not placed on any navigable river but lies at the outlet to the plain of the most important road from Mongolia—that which utilizes the valley of the Hun-ho at Kalgan and debouches on to the lowland by the Nankow pass.
Only 35 miles north-west of the city at its nearest point, the Great Wall of China, following the crests of the scarpland belt at an elevation of 4,000 feet, marks the historic frontier defence of the agricultural plain against the pastoral nomads of the in terior plateaux. The narrow apex of the plain is thus the crucial region in the relations of China, Mongolia and Manchuria, and is historically the border zone between two strongly contrasted types of social organisation.
The earliest city of which there is authentic record was that of Ch'i the capital of Yen, the most northerly of the feudal states which acknowledged the authority of the Chou Dynasty in the twelfth century B.C. Thus early was the site of Peking within the Chinese culture area, but Yen was clearly a buffer state, intended to keep back the Tartar hordes, and is significantly mentioned in records of the sixth century B.C. as possessing great numbers of horses. Ch'ien Lung, the famous scholar-Emperor of the Manchu Dynasty, made extensive researches into the exact site of Ch'i and located it slightly to the north of the present city. It was destroyed by Shih Huang Ti, the "First Emperor" and founder of the Chin Dynasty (221 B.c.), who unified China and completed
the frontier defences of the Great Wall. Yen was one of the dis tricts which made up his Empire.
Under the Han Dynasty a new city arose close to the site of Ch'i and was known first as Yen and later as Yu-chow. It remained a definitely Chinese city until the end of the Han Dynasty but in the ensuing period of anarchy and disintegration was for two cen turies under Tartar control. The 'rang dynasty (7th to loth cen turies), like the Han, maintained the frontier defences of the Em pire intact, and Yu-chow was the head-quarters of a military gov ernor. But early in the loth cen tury it came into the hands of the Khitans, one of the most famous of the Tartar groups prior to the rise of the Mongols, who success fully resisted the attempts of the Sung Emperors to recover it for China. The Khitans under the Liao Dynasty (sometimes called the Iron Dynasty) rechristened the city Nan-Ching, signifying southern capital and later (986) rebuilt it on imperial lines with walls said to have been 13 miles in length and 3o feet high.
From early in the eleventh century it was known as Yenching but the Khitans of the Iron Dynasty continued to hold it until II 2 2 when it was captured by the chief of the Tartars of the Golden Horde from the northern steppes of Manchuria, who greatly enlarged and beautified it and made it one of the three capitals of his large Empire, that of the Kin or Chin (Gold) Dynasty. The other two capitals were Pien Ching (now Kai Feng) in Honan and Sheng-Ching (Mukden) in the north, so the future Peking was known at this period as Chung-Tu or the Mid dle Capital. This phase lasted until early in the thirteenth cen tury when the greatest of all the steppeland powers arose, the Mongol empire. Kublai Khan took the decisive step of making it the metropolitan city of the immense Mongol Empire, which now stretched from the Pacific to beyond the Black Sea. But although this was the technical status of the city after Kublai had moved his headquarters there from Karakorum in 1267, it was as the new capital of China that the choice was of the greatest ultimate significance. Kublai was indeed the "Great Khan who ruled in China" but his descendants were primarily Emperors of China.