Beijing

39.9163°N, 116.3906°E.

Beijing — capital of the People's Republic of China and the cultural, political, and educational centre of the country, with continuous urban occupation documented since at least the eleventh century BCE. The modern city core preserves the Ming-Qing imperial axis: a 7.8-kilometre straight line running south from the Bell and Drum Towers through the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square to the Yongdingmen southern gate. The axis was laid out under the Yongle Emperor of the Ming Dynasty between 1406 and 1420 CE and is oriented 2°10′ west of true north — a deviation that some scholars have interpreted as deliberate alignment to a specific astronomical or geomantic feature, though the Ming court records do not document the reasoning. The Forbidden City at the centre of the axis covers 720,000 square metres with 980 surviving buildings and was the imperial residence of 24 Ming and Qing emperors between 1420 and 1912. UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987.

The city whose central architectural axis defined the Chinese imperial cosmos for half a millennium, with the 2°10′ northwesterly offset never fully explained in the surviving Ming construction records.