“我太想进步了”——南京古都身份构建的历程'I Really Want to Get Ahead': How Nanjing Built Its Identity as an Ancient Capital

Some warm-up questions: What other names for Nanjing do you know? Which regimes has Nanjing served as the political centre of? What notable cities were there in the south during the Qin and Han? What was Nanjing called then? China's great ancient capitals are almost all in the Guanzhong region and the North China Plain; Nanjing is the only exception in the Yangtze basin. Although it was not the capital of a nationwide regime for long, Nanjing, with its reputation as "ancient capital of the Six Dynasties", was for most of history the undisputed political centre of the middle and lower Yangtze. For this reason, many people have argued from all sorts of angles for Nanjing's advantages as a capital. Through this session, however, we may discover that none of this was so self-evident. Nanjing, almost unknown in the Qin and Han, suddenly overtook the other great cities of the south in the Three Kingdoms period to become the capital of Eastern Wu. Over the following centuries its status rose and fell amid controversy, yet kept being strengthened by one turn of events after another, until at the end of the Southern Dynasties it finally completed its grand construction as an ancient capital. It took nearly three hundred years for Nanjing truly to become the undisputed political centre of southern China. We will focus on the political changes and the intellectual and cultural mood of the fourth and fifth centuries AD, tracing how Nanjing built its status as an ancient capital and the landmark events along the way. After the session we can also try to discuss the following questions: Was Nanjing, which never served long as a national capital, a capital of a regime content with ruling half the country? What does building grand palaces mean for a regime? Why did the Southern Song decide against making Nanjing its capital?