Beijing

A city on the North China Plain, sited near the plain's northern edge where it narrows toward mountain passes leading to the Mongolian Plateau and Manchuria beyond. That siting placed it at a historic gateway between the agricultural heartland of China proper and the steppe and forest lands to the north, a position that repeatedly made it a strategic seat for controlling movement between the two zones. The plain around it is drained by several smaller rivers rather than one dominant waterway, and the city has depended on constructed canals, most notably the Grand Canal reaching south to the Yangtze basin, to move grain and goods at the scale its population has required.