The Lost Imperial Capital: A Journey into the Past Along the Huai River

Using the Huai River as its framework and the Mingzhongdu City on its banks as its focal point, this book vividly recounts the region’s historical and cultural transformations, from the Huaiyi culture through the end of the Ming and the beginning of the Qing.

For years, the author conducted more than a dozen field trips to the middle and lower reaches of the Huai River and the Jiangnan region. Their travels took them to Nanjing, Huai’an, Xuyi, Fengyang, Dingyuan, Mengcheng, Lai’an, Mingguang, Bengbu, Chuzhou, Suzhou, Changzhou, Songjiang, Jiaxing, Zhuji, Qingtian, and other cities and counties. They uncovered, excavated, and studied historical sources, and visited rural historical sites in person, tracing the origins and development of Huai River culture and Jiangnan culture, as well as the distinct qualities that emerged from each.

Through the rise and fall of Mingzhongdu, the city Zhu Yuanzhang built beside the Huai River, the book explores the reasons for the decline of culture in the Huai River basin during the early Ming dynasty and the region’s influence on Jiangnan’s economy and culture. The Ming dynasty was an important period in China’s more than two thousand years of imperial autocracy. Zhu Yuanzhang’s emergence at a particular moment in Chinese history was inevitable. Yet the institutions he devised and the governing methods he vigorously imposed directly led to nearly three centuries of stagnation and even regression.