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This is a line. 7.8 kilometers, from the Bell and Drum Towers in the north to

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Yongding Gate in the south. It passes through the imperial palace,

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through the altars and temples of sacrifice, through the busiest districts of a city,

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with the buildings on either side laid out in symmetry.

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This line was built more than 700 years ago, and it is still the spine the city

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is arranged around. Its length — according to China's National Cultural Heritage Administration,

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the longest surviving urban axis in the world.

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This place has been called many names.

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Every name marks a change of master.

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The earliest was Ji. In about 1045 BC — the year after King Wu of Zhou overthrew

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the Shang — the descendants of the Yellow Emperor were enfeoffed here;

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another account says the descendants of Emperor Yao.

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The year before, the year of the conquest itself, Duke Shi of Shao was enfeoffed at

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Yan, with its capital at Liulihe in today's Fangshan.

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The history of Beijing as a city begins the moment Ji was granted.

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For the thousand years that followed, this was a frontier.

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In Qin and Han times it was called Ji, and also Youzhou

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"you" itself carries the sense of somewhere remote.

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It was called a "capital" for the first time in 938 AD.

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The Khitans took the Sixteen Prefectures and promoted Youzhou to Nanjing,

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also known as Yanjing. But to be clear: the Khitan capital was at Shangjing,

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and Nanjing was only a secondary capital — this is where Beijing's claim to the word "capital"

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begins, but it was not yet the seat of a state.

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It became a real capital in 1153, when the Jurchen Jin moved their capital here under Prince

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Hailing and renamed it Zhongdu. One easily confused point: the year 1153 appears in the histories

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under two reign titles, "Tiande 5" and "Zhenyuan 1," because the reign title changed within that

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same year. They refer to one event, not two.

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From that year, Beijing has been a capital for more than 870 years.

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Then came the Yuan and Dadu, named in 1272.

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After the Ming was founded it became Beiping — "the north pacified."

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Then, in 1403, Beiping was renamed Beijing.

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That is where the two characters "Beijing" begin.

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What followed: the Qing called it Jingshi.

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In 1928 the national capital moved south and the name reverted to Beiping,

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which was also made Beiping Special City — the first time Beijing was formally established as a

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municipality. Then on 27 September 1949 the First Plenary Session of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference resolved

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to rename Beiping as Beijing and make it the capital.

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Count the name changes. One name has been in use for more than 600 years,

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and was taken away for 21 of them.

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That is Beijing.

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The man who turned Beiping into Beijing was Zhu Di.

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He was Zhu Yuanzhang's fourth son.

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In Hongwu 3, 1370, he was made Prince of Yan;

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only in Hongwu 13, 1381, did he take up residence in Beiping.

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Those are two different years, eleven years apart.

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Beiping was then the empire's frontier.

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Zhu Di lived here for over a decade, garrisoning the border and drilling troops.

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Then in 1399 he raised an army and marched south.

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It took him more than three years to reach Nanjing,

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and in 1402 he took the throne.

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As emperor, he did a thing many at court opposed.

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He moved the capital from Nanjing to the fief he had been given as a boy.

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In 1403 Li Zhigang, minister of rites, petitioned to raise Beiping's status.

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The court agreed. Beiping was renamed Beijing, and Beiping Prefecture became Shuntian Prefecture.

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This is where the name "Beijing" begins.

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Three years later, in 1406, the order to build was issued.

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By 1420 the palaces and walls stood.

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In the first month of 1421 the capital formally moved.

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Eighteen years passed between the renaming and the move.

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He moved very slowly, and very steadily.

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One thing to add here. Who designed the Forbidden City?

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The story most widely told is that Kuai Xiang designed it.

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That story has no basis in the official histories.

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The histories record Kuai Xiang as an outstanding craftsman and master builder of the Ming who

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took part in palace construction; crediting one man with the design of the entire palace city

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is a later legend. What actually happened is this: these were people who left no names

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behind, and it took them more than a decade to raise this,

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brick by brick. This film mentions him only as a legend.

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Now a more practical question. What did Beijing live on?

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In an agricultural age, this was not a good place for a city.

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No large granaries, mountains to the north, cold winters.

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Say a few hundred thousand people, a million people.

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Where was the grain to come from?

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The answer: it came by water, from the south.

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And the key to moving grain was water.

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Once the Yuan made Dadu its capital, a problem appeared.

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The Grand Canal ended in Shandong, so grain barges had to stop at Tongzhou.

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From there the grain went into the city overland — a few dozen li,

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carried on backs and hauled by cart — and the cost was extremely high.

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The man who solved this was Guo Shoujing.

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In Zhiyuan 28, 1291, he presented eleven points on water management to Kublai Khan.

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His proposal was to draw water from Baifu Spring in Changping,

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run it southeast to join the canal, and bring the barges straight into Dadu itself.

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Work began in the spring of 1292 and was finished in the autumn of 1293.

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Its total length: 164 li, about 82 kilometers.

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On 26 August 1293 — written in the History of Yuan as the dingchou day of the seventh month

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of Zhiyuan 30 — Kublai Khan named the river the Tonghui River and granted Guo Shoujing 12,500

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strings of paper money. The histories also recorded the labour that went into it.

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19,129 soldiers. 542 craftsmen. 319 boatmen.

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172 convicts whose property had been confiscated.

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2.85 million man-days in all. Once the river was open,

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grain barges could sail straight into Jishuitan, inside Dadu — the place we now call Shichahai.

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Jishuitan was now the northernmost grain port of the Grand Canal.

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In the middle and late Yuan, grain landed here at a peak of two to three

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million dan a year. So there is one line to end this act with.

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The foundation of a capital was laid with grain carried in from a thousand kilometers away.

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This system ran for centuries. But it came at a price.

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Every li of the canal had someone pulling on it.

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Under the grain-transport system, the grain did not carry itself:

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boats on the canal were hauled by men, and the water level was controlled by locks.

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The cost of building the city weighed just as heavily.

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Timber, brick, stone, labour — requisitioned from every part of the country,

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and many of those people left no names behind.

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There was another cost, too, and it was the water itself.

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Once Baifu Spring was diverted, the waterway silted up again and again over the centuries,

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and was repaired again and again.

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In recent times the Tonghui River ceased entirely to function as a grain route.

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Beijing today is a city short of water, and the water it does have comes from

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far away. The arrangement that once fed a capital ended up changing the waterways of the

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whole region. In the modern era another dispute appeared.

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Should the old city be protected, and to what extent?

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Should the people living inside it be moved out?

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That dispute is not new. What is clear is the recent legislation.

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On 1 October 2022, the Regulations on the Protection of the Cultural Heritage of the Beijing Central Axis

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took effect. After the Central Axis was inscribed, the Regulations on the Protection of the Beijing

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Central Axis as World Cultural Heritage were promulgated and took effect on 30 May 2025.

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And the Regulations of Beijing Municipality on the Protection of the Great Wall were adopted on

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28 November 2025, to take effect on 1 March 2026.

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Three separate instruments, three separate years, all of them within the last four years.

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What must be protected will be protected.

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That is the direction that has been set.

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As to how, and how to balance protection against use,

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opinions have always differed. This film lists the existing regulations and the facts as they stand.

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It does not sit in judgment.

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We are not the ones who decide where that line falls,

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and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

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On 27 July 2024, at 11:15 in the morning, at the 46th session of the World Heritage Committee

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in New Delhi, India, the Beijing Central Axis was inscribed on the World Heritage List

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all its elements at once. It is made up of fifteen component sites.

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Counting from north to south: the Bell and Drum Towers,

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Wanning Bridge, Jingshan, the Forbidden City, Duanmen, Tiananmen, the Outer Golden Water Bridges,

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the Imperial Ancestral Temple, the Altar of Land and Grain,

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Tiananmen Square and its buildings, Zhengyangmen, the surviving road remains of the southern Central Axis,

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the Temple of Heaven, the Altar of the First Farmer,

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and Yongding Gate. They fall into five categories: ancient imperial palace and garden architecture;

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ancient imperial sacrificial architecture; ancient urban management facilities; state ceremonial and public buildings;

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and surviving central road remains. This arrangement embodies the ideal capital paradigm recorded in the Kaogongji.

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That is the World Heritage Centre's formulation, not ours.

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The heritage area covers 589 hectares, with a buffer zone of 4,542 hectares.

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The line was begun in the Yuan, took shape in the Ming,

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and is now more than seven centuries old.

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Beijing today has eight World Cultural Heritage sites.

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Zhoukoudian, where the Peking Man was found.

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The Great Wall. The Forbidden City.

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The Summer Palace. The Temple of Heaven.

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The Ming Tombs. The Grand Canal.

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And the Beijing Central Axis, inscribed in 2024.

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That is the highest count of any city in the world.

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The city also has 135 Major Historical and Cultural Sites Protected at the National Level,

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likewise the highest of any city in the country, along with 14 UNESCO intangible cultural heritage

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items. And beyond all these listings, there is one thing in Beijing that has not been

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inscribed. The courtyards in the hutongs and the siheyuan where people still live.

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Below the Bell and Drum Towers, people are out walking in the morning.

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Beside the Altar of the First Farmer, children run past on their way home from school.

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In the old neighborhoods, laundry hangs between the courtyard walls,

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bicycles lean against the gateposts, and the smell of cooking comes through the doorway.

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Nothing about any of it is on a list, and nothing about it is trying to

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be. All of it is the reason the rest of it was worth protecting.

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A capital seven centuries old, in the end, comes back down to this everyday life.

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Look back at this city. It was put here not because this was the best place

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to grow grain, and not because it was the richest.

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It was put here because it is in the north,

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where it could hold the steppe and the Central Plains at the same time.

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To keep it alive, grain from the south was loaded onto boats and carried more than

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a thousand kilometers north along the water, to come ashore at Jishuitan.

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The city did not grow where the food was.

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It moved the food to where the city was.

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So there is the argument this film has been making.

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A city cannot feed itself. Every wall, every gate, every courtyard along that line,

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stood on grain that came from somewhere else.

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The waterway that joined the south to the north is the Grand Canal.

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It was inscribed as World Cultural Heritage in 2014, and that inscription includes the Tonghui River section

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in Beijing. Beijing's stretch is only its tail end.

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The real starting point, the busiest part, is in the south.

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Next time, we follow the canal south, to Yangzhou.

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The measurements they took are still accurate today.

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Seven-point-eight kilometers. One hundred and sixty-four li.

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A date in August 1293. They had no instruments to check their work against,

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and no way to know that anyone would ever look.

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Whatever they used to set that line, the line held.

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The full transcript for this film, the bibliography, and further reading are at sylogs.com.

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Subscribe to this channel, and we will see you at the next stop.