Beijing
Beijing was not always the Chinese capital – different ruling dynasties have usually moved the role of capital to their home city within the country, and Beijing was no exception to this.
Beijing’s founders had come from Mongolia, and the city was originally named Khanbaliq in Mongolian. But it in turn had been built on the site of the city destroyed by the Mongolian invaders, and this in turn gave way to subsequent reinventions of the city under a more typically Chinese culture.
However, as it was the custom of each new dynasty to remove the power-structure of its predecessor, the previous capitals of China – with the exception of Xi’an, built on such a scale it was hard to eradicate – were mostly deliberately downgraded and had their palaces and royal structures removed to prevent them becoming powerful once again.
Thus Beijing, as the most recent of the Imperial capitals of China, retains the greatest number of Imperial buildings… although even these have been reduced by the change to Communism, and the 1960s policy of “cultural revolution” that aimed to destroy the previous Imperial culture.