Mingzhong Capital Imperial City Ruins

National and provincial key cultural relics protection units. Located in the northwest corner of Fengyang County in eastern Anhui, it was a capital built by Zhu Yuanzhang, the founding emperor of the Ming Dynasty, in Fengyang, his birthplace, but died in the middle. In 1369, in order to show the power of his new dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang began to mobilize hundreds of craftsmen, sergeants and civilians all over the country, tens of thousands of them, and built a central capital in Fengyang. "Building the system of the city and the palace is like the capital of the capital", using the "Palace Emperor" as a model, and setting up the "Department of Industry and Industry", which is "large in scale, prosperous in regulation, and high in craftsmanship, and it is the best in the world." Zhongducheng has three inner, middle and outer cities. The outer city has a circumference of about 30 kilometers and has four gates. There is a straight main road within each gate, which criss-crosses. The middle one is the forbidden wall, with a circumference of 7.85 kilometers, a rectangular plane, and four gates on four sides. Namely Chengtian Gate in the south, Bei'an Gate in the north, Dong'an Gate in the east, and Xi'an Gate in the west. Inside the forbidden wall is a moat with a width of about 80 meters. The inner city, the imperial city, is surrounded by the moat. The imperial city has a circumference of 3.68 kilometers and a nearly square plane, covering an area of 840,000 square meters. It is built with special large bricks with a length of 40, a width of 20 and a thickness of 11 cm. In Zhongdu City, there is a central axis running through the north and south of the city. This central axis starts from Hongwumen in the outer city in the south and ends at the north gate (unbuilt) of the outer city in the north, with a total length of nearly 7 kilometers. All kinds of buildings in Zhongdu City are arranged symmetrically on both sides of this central axis. The center is the three main halls, the left and right are the east and west halls respectively, and the two wings are the Wenhua and Wuying halls respectively. The front is Fengtianmen, and the rear is the three palaces. To the south of the Meridian Gate of the Imperial City, on the left are the Zhongshu Province and the Taimiao Temple, and on the right are the Dadudu Palace, the Censor Terrace and the Sheji. In the eighth year of Hongwu in Ming Dynasty (1375), he "stopped working in the central capital". Later, due to the construction of Longxing Temple and the fire of the calendar war, the city walls and palaces were destroyed in large quantities. By the early 1970s, only the remaining Meridian Gate, Xihuamen platform and 1,100-meter-long city wall remained. The layout and relics and ruins are still spectacular. Currently being repaired.