Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Road
, the trading route that stretched all the way to Central Asia: Marco Polo described “over
a thousand carts loaded with silk” arriving in the city almost every day. It allowed the Khans,
who later proclaimed themselves emperors, to aspire to new heights of grandeur, with Kublai
building himself a palace of astonishing proportions, walled on all sides and approached by
great marble stairways; sadly, nothing remains of it now, though its name, “Xanadu”, lives
on.
The Ming dynasty
With the accession of the
Mingdynasty
, who defeated the Mongols in 1368, the capital shif-
ted temporarily to Nanjing. However, the second Ming emperor,
Yongle
, returned to Beijing,
building around him prototypes of the city's two great monuments, the Forbidden City and
the Temple of Heaven. It was during Yongle's reign, too, that the city's basic layout took
shape, rigidly symmetrical, extending in squares and rectangles from the palace and inner-
city grid to the suburbs, much as it is today. It's estimated that over 250,000 prisoners of war
were used as slaves during these epic waves of construction, numbers which - along with
arrivals (sometimes forced) from the previous capital of Nanjing - swelled the city's popu-
lation to over one million. The city almost certainly became the first place on earth to reach
that figure.
