Chinese Cities as Sacred Landscapes: The Case of the Capitals of the Ming Dynasty

The advent of the Ming dynasty marks a break through in the history of Chinese architecture. The first Ming rulers Hongwu and Yongle were indeed engaged in a huge building effort, aimed at showing symbolically their divine rights to power—the “Mandate of Heaven”. This resulted in as much as three projected capitals in the course of a few decades: first, a re-planning of Nanjing; second, a completely new capital in Fengyang, which remained unfinished; and finally, of course, the planning and building of Ming Beijing. In the present paper, we explore and compare cognitive and symbolic aspects of these three “sacred landscapes of power” using the methods of modern Archaeoastronomy and Archaeotopography. In this way, we are able to highlight astronomical alignments but also topographical and magnetic orientations, which appear to be related to the feng shui tradition in both its “form” and “compass” schools. These results help in placing the architecture of the Ming capitals within the original perception of the landscape at the time of their planning, also with the aim of contributing to the preservation and fruition of this important Chinese cultural heritage.