Occupying a strategic site on the south bank of the Yangzi River in a beautiful setting of lakes, river, wooded hills and mountain defences, Nanjing has had an important role from the earliest times, though not until 600 BC were there the beginnings of a walled city. By the time the Han empire broke up in 220 AD, Nanjing was the capital of half a dozen local dynasties, and when the Sui reunited China in 589, the building of the Grand Canal began considerably to increase the city's economic importance. It became renowned for its forges, foundries and weaving, especially for the veined brocade made in noble houses and monasteries. During the Tang and Song periods, Nanjing rivalled nearby Hangzhou as the wealthiest city in the country, until in 1368 the first emperor of the Ming dynasty decided to establish it as the capital of all China.

For centuries thereafter, although Nanjing's claims to be the capital would be usurped by the heavily northern-based Qing dynasty, anti-authoritarian movements always associated themselves with movements to restore the old capital. For eleven years, in the mid-nineteenth century, the Taiping rebels set up the capital of their Heavenly Kingdom at Nanjing. The siege and final recapture of the city by the foreign-backed Qing armies in 1864 was one of the saddest and most dramatic events in China's history. After the Opium War, the Treaty of Nanking which ceded Hong Kong to Britain was signed here in 1841, and Nanjing itself also suffered the indignity of being a treaty port. Following the overthrow of the Qing dynasty in 1911, however, the city flowered again and became the provisional capital of the new Republic of China, with Sun Yatsen as its first president. Sun Yatsen's mausoleum, Zhongshan Ling , on the edge of modern Nanjing, is one of the Chinese people's great centres of pilgrimage.

In 1937, the name of Nanjing became synonymous with one of the worst atrocities of World War II, after the so-called Rape of Nanking , in which invading Japanese soldiers butchered an estimated three hundred thousand civilians. Subsequently, Chiang Kaishek's government escaped the Japanese advance by moving west to Chongqing, though after Japan's surrender and Chiang's return, Nanjing briefly resumed its status as the official capital of China. Just four years later, however, in 1949, the victorious Communists decided to abandon Nanjing as capital altogether, choosing instead the ancient - and highly conservative - city of Beijing in which to base the country's first "modern" government.

Despite its fall in status, the city remains an important rail junction - a great 1960s bridge carries the Beijing-Shanghai line over the Yangzi - and a major river port for large ships. Nowadays as the capital of Jiangsu Province with a population of more than four million, Nanjing, with its broad, tree-lined boulevards and balconied houses within Ming walls and gates, is one of the most attractive of the major Chinese cities