Vuë de Peking, tirée de Nieuhof [北京的风景 北京的风景 ]

Original antique print of Beijing, capital of China, created by Johan Nieuhof and published in Paris in 1750. The image shows a panoramic view of the city as Nieuhof observed it during his visit in the 1650s, when Beijing had become the permanent capital of the Qing Dynasty. The work depicts the city at a time when it had approximately 700,000 inhabitants, making it one of the most populous cities in the world alongside Constantinople. Under the previous Ming Dynasty, Beijing had shared its capital function with Nanjing, but the Qing established it as their sole seat of government. The name Peking is a Western adaptation of Beijing, meaning “Northern Capital”. Johan Nieuhof was a seventeenth-century Dutch traveler and writer who participated in a Dutch East India Company embassy to the Chinese emperor. His accounts and drawings of China, originally published in the 1660s, were reprinted and reproduced throughout the eighteenth century due to strong European interest in the Chinese Empire. This print is part of those later editions.