Somewhere in what is now southwestern Beijing, a city was born. Around 1045 B.C.E., the newly triumphant Zhou dynasty carved up the old Shang realm and awarded titles to loyal nobles — including rulers of two city-states that would shape the next three millennia. One of them was Ji. It was a modest beginning for what would become one of the most consequential cities on Earth.
What the evidence shows
- City of Ji: The Zhou dynasty’s founding of Ji around 1045 B.C.E. marks the earliest archaeologically supported origin of Beijing as a settled urban center.
- Bronze Age archaeology: Bronzeware inscriptions, palace roof tiles, and ceramic-lined wells excavated near present-day Guang’anmen confirm the city’s southwestern location within modern Beijing.
- Zhou dynasty city-states: Two polities — Ji and Yan — were established in the region simultaneously; Yan’s capital has been unearthed at Liulihe in Fangshan District, roughly 45 kilometers south of Ji.
How Ji came to be
The Zhou victory over the Shang dynasty was military, but its consolidation was political. King Wu of Zhou, eager to anchor his legitimacy, distributed rulership across his domain almost immediately after the conquest. According to the historian Sima Qian, writing in the 1st century B.C.E., King Wu named the descendants of the legendary Yellow Emperor as rulers of Ji — doing so, tradition holds, before he even dismounted his chariot.
The state of Yan, Ji’s neighbor and eventual rival, was awarded to Shi, the Duke of Shao, a close royal kinsman. Shi was occupied elsewhere and sent his eldest son, Ke, in his place. Ke became the recognized founder of Yan. The two city-states would coexist, compete, and eventually merge over the following centuries.
The Beijing Government officially uses 1045 B.C.E. as the founding date — an estimate derived from cross-referencing Sima Qian’s accounts with bronzeware inscriptions and astronomical records, since Sima Qian’s chronology before 841 B.C.E. cannot yet be definitively matched to the Gregorian calendar.
A city built on older ground
Ji was not founded on empty land. The region had been inhabited continuously for hundreds of thousands of years. Peking Man, a Homo erectus population, lived in caves at Zhoukoudian between roughly 770,000 and 230,000 years ago. Stone Age tools and bone fragments from 24,000 to 25,000 years ago were found in 1996 beneath what is now a downtown shopping mall. Neolithic farming settlements, some dating back 6,000 to 7,000 years, have been identified at over 40 sites across the broader Beijing municipality.
The area’s geography made it strategically irresistible. Positioned where the North China Plain meets the mountain passes leading to the steppe, it sat at the seam between agricultural civilization and the nomadic world beyond. Whoever held this ground could monitor — and sometimes control — the border between those two worlds.
From city-state to imperial capital
For most of the first millennium B.C.E., Ji functioned as a regional center. The state of Yan eventually absorbed Ji and made it its capital, calling it Jicheng — the City of Ji. When Yan fell to the Qin dynasty’s unification campaign in 222 B.C.E., Jicheng became a provincial city in the first unified Chinese empire.
Its transformation into a great capital came in stages. The Khitan Liao dynasty made it a secondary capital in the 10th century C.E. The Jurchen-led Jin dynasty elevated it further in the 12th century. Then, in 1279 C.E., Kublai Khan made the city — then called Dadu — the capital of the Yuan dynasty, and for the first time all of China was ruled from this single location. The Ming dynasty renamed and rebuilt it as Beijing — “Northern Capital” — in 1421 C.E. It has served as China’s capital in almost every era since.
The city’s founding myth also carries a notable thread: its legitimacy was tied from the start to the Yellow Emperor, the semi-mythological ancestor claimed by the Huaxia people as common forefather. That founding gesture — naming the rulers of Ji as the Yellow Emperor’s descendants — embedded a claim about ethnic and cultural continuity into the city’s very origin story.
Lasting impact
The establishment of Ji set in motion a 3,000-year urban history that is still unfolding. Today, Beijing is home to more than 21 million people and serves as the political, cultural, and educational center of the world’s most populous nation. The city’s physical footprint has expanded enormously, but its core has remained in roughly the same location since the Zhou era — a continuity rare among the world’s great cities.
The early pairing of Ji and Yan also foreshadowed a pattern that would repeat throughout Chinese history: the north as a zone of contact, negotiation, and sometimes conflict between the agrarian heartland and the steppe. That geographic reality shaped Chinese statecraft, wall-building, and diplomacy for millennia. It shaped the Silk Road. It shaped the Mongol empire. It still shapes how China thinks about its northern frontier.
The city’s layered names — Ji, Jicheng, Youzhou, Zhongdu, Dadu, Beiping, Beijing — are not just linguistic curiosities. Each reflects a new political order claiming an ancient place. The UNESCO-listed Imperial Palace at the heart of modern Beijing sits within walking distance of where Zhou-era palace tiles were found in the ground. The city remembers what it was built on.
Blindspots and limits
The founding of Ji is known primarily through a single textual source — Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian, written roughly 900 years after the events it describes — supported by bronzeware inscriptions that confirm the broad strokes but not all the details. The precise location of the City of Ji has never been fully excavated; much of it lies beneath a densely populated modern city. The lives of the people who actually built and inhabited Ji — their languages, beliefs, agricultural practices, and social structures — remain largely invisible in the written record, which focuses almost entirely on rulers and conquests.
Read more
For more on this story, see: History of Beijing — Wikipedia
For more from Good News for Humankind, see:
- Indigenous land rights: 160 million hectares recognized ahead of COP30
- Ghana establishes marine protected area at Cape Three Points
- The Good News for Humankind archive on ancient history
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