125 Fun Facts About Urban

A megacity is usually defined as an urban area with more than how many people?

A megacity is an urban area of more than 10,000,000 people; because surveys draw a city's edge differently, the UN counted 33 of them in 2025 while another tally found 42.

Which Southeast Asian capital did the UN rank in 2025 as the world's most populous city?

Jakarta's urban area held nearly 42 million people in the UN's 2025 count, which applied one common definition of a city worldwide and dropped long-time leader Tokyo to third.

Which city is widely considered the most densely populated built-up urban area in the world?

Dhaka is widely considered the world's densest major urban area, at well over 20,000 people per square kilometre; migrants from rural Bangladesh have swelled it to about 37 million on the UN's 2025 count.

Which Chinese municipality is the largest 'city proper' in the world, at roughly the size of Austria?

Chongqing municipality covers about 82,000 square kilometres, close to Austria's area, and holds some 32 million people, many of them in rural counties far from the city centre.

Which city served as the US capital for the decade before Washington took over in 1800?

Philadelphia was the temporary US capital from 1790 to 1800 under the Residence Act, while the new federal city of Washington was being built on the Potomac.

Which Mesopotamian city do most archaeologists consider the first true city?

Uruk, in southern Mesopotamia, is usually called the first true city; writing first appeared there around 3200 BC, and legend credits its great wall to King Gilgamesh.

Which city is generally credited as the first to reach one million inhabitants?

Rome is generally credited as the first city to reach one million inhabitants, around the reign of Augustus; after the empire fell, its population shrank to a few tens of thousands.

Which city is described as the oldest capital city in the world?

Damascus has been settled since at least the third millennium BC and is usually called the oldest continuously inhabited capital; its name also gave English the fabric word damask.

What kind of 8.5-metre stone structure, built at Jericho about 10,000 years ago, has a staircase inside?

A tower: Jericho's stone tower, with 22 steps inside, dates from about 8000 BCE and is among the oldest monumental buildings known; a reliable spring had drawn settlers there from roughly 9000 BCE.

The Bible calls Jericho the city of what trees?

Palms: Deuteronomy 34:3 calls Jericho 'the city of palm trees'; the town is an oasis in the Jordan Valley, where a copious spring has fed date palms since ancient times.

The Neolithic proto-city of Çatalhöyük is in which modern country?

Çatalhöyük lies in Turkey, on the Konya Plain of central Anatolia; around 7000 BC its several thousand residents lived in houses packed so tightly, with no streets, that they came and went through the roof.

Mohenjo-daro, built around 2500 BCE, belonged to which civilisation?

Mohenjo-daro, in Pakistan's Sindh province, was one of the largest cities of the Indus Valley civilisation; abandoned by about 1700 BCE, it lay forgotten until archaeologists rediscovered it in the 1920s.

Which was the largest city in the pre-Columbian Americas?

Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, was linked to the mainland by causeways and held more than 200,000 people before Spanish forces and their allies besieged and destroyed it in 1521.

Mexico City's main square, laid out over the ceremonial centre of the Aztec capital, is popularly known as what?

The Zócalo has been the city's gathering place since Aztec times; the Spanish raised their cathedral and the viceroy's palace on its edges, and its formal name is Plaza de la Constitución.

Which of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World stood at Alexandria?

The Lighthouse of Alexandria, on the island of Pharos, was completed under Ptolemy II around 280 BC and stood over 100 metres tall until medieval earthquakes toppled it.

Which legendary Phoenician queen is said to have founded Carthage?

Dido, also called Elissa, is the legendary princess of Tyre who founded Carthage; in the tale she was offered only the land an oxhide could cover, so she cut the hide into thin strips to ring a whole hill.

In Roman legend, who founded Rome in 753 BC after killing his twin brother?

Romulus killed Remus, in the best-known telling for mocking and leaping over his half-built city wall; Romans celebrated the founding every 21 April.

A first-century BC poem by Tibullus calls Italy's capital which kind of city?

Eternal: Tibullus wrote of the walls of the 'eternal city'; Ovid later echoed the phrase, and the nickname has stuck for two thousand years.

Which country lies entirely inside another country's capital city?

Vatican City lies wholly inside Italy's capital; the 1929 Lateran Treaty made it a sovereign state, ending a standoff that began when Italy seized the papal lands in 1870.

Which corps has guarded the popes since 1506?

The Swiss Guard lost most of its men defending Pope Clement VII when imperial troops sacked the city in 1527; new recruits are still sworn in each 6 May, the anniversary.

Citizenship of the pope's city-state normally depends on what?

Holding a job there is the usual route: citizenship comes with an appointment to serve the Holy See, not with birth on its soil, and normally ends when the post does.

Which is the world's most densely populated sovereign state?

Monaco squeezes about 38,000 people into roughly 2 square kilometres, the highest density of any sovereign state, even after land reclaimed from the sea enlarged it by about a fifth.

Which family has ruled the principality on the French Riviera since 1297?

The Grimaldi family arrived in 1297, when François Grimaldi, by tradition disguised as a friar, seized the fortress on the rock; the family has returned after each interruption, the last under French rule from 1793 to 1814.

Which small territory is described as the most densely populated place on Earth?

Macau, a former Portuguese colony, packs about 700,000 people into some 33 square kilometres, over 20,000 per square kilometre; reclaiming land from the sea has tripled its area.

As of 2025, which city has the most skyscrapers, counting buildings taller than 150 metres?

Hong Kong has more buildings over 150 metres than any other city, well over 500; steep mountains and scarce flat land left it little choice but to build upward.

Britain's 1898 lease on the New Territories ran for how many years?

The 1898 Second Convention of Peking leased the New Territories to Britain for 99 years, so in 1997 Britain handed back the whole colony, including land it had been ceded outright.

Which ungoverned Hong Kong enclave, demolished in 1993–94, packed about 33,000 people into just 2.6 hectares?

Kowloon Walled City began as a Chinese fort that Britain's 1898 lease left as an enclave; neither side governed it, so it grew into an unregulated maze of towers until a park replaced it.

About how many people live in Dharavi, often called one of the world's largest slums?

Dharavi is usually put at around 1,000,000 residents on roughly 2.4 square kilometres in the heart of India's biggest city; far from idle, it hums with leather, pottery and recycling workshops.

The word 'favela' was first used for a slum in which city?

Soldiers returning from the 1897 Canudos War settled a hill in Rio de Janeiro they called Morro da Favela, after the favela plant of Bahia, and the name spread to all such settlements.

Which capital has lions and rhinos roaming a national park inside its city limits?

Nairobi National Park, established in 1946, begins only about 7 km from the city centre; it is fenced on three sides, with the south left open so herds can migrate, and lions roam within sight of the skyline.

The Kenyan capital's name comes from a Maasai phrase meaning what?

Nairobi comes from the Maasai phrase Enkare Nyrobi, 'place of cool waters', after the stream there; the city began in the late 1890s as a depot on the Uganda Railway.

Johannesburg was established in 1886 after the discovery of what?

Johannesburg sprang up after gold was found on the Witwatersrand in 1886; within a decade the mining camp had passed 100,000 people.

Which is the world's coldest capital city by average yearly temperature?

Ulaanbaatar's yearly mean temperature hovers around freezing, the lowest of any national capital, because it sits about 1,350 metres up, far from any sea and under the Siberian winter high.

What does Ulaanbaatar, the name Mongolia's capital adopted in 1924, mean?

Ulaanbaatar means 'Red Hero' in Mongolian; the city, previously called Urga or Niislel Khüree, took the name in 1924 when Mongolia became a people's republic.

Which is the world's northernmost capital of a sovereign state?

Reykjavík sits at about 64°08′ N, the northernmost capital of a sovereign state; Greenland's capital, Nuuk, lies a few kilometres farther north, but Greenland is not sovereign.

Iceland's capital takes its name from Old Norse words meaning what?

Reykjavík means 'smoky bay' in Old Norse (reykr, smoke; vík, bay); the 'smoke' is said to have been steam rising from the area's hot springs.

Which is the world's southernmost capital of a sovereign state, a city also famed for its strong winds?

Wellington, at latitude 41°17′ S, is the southernmost national capital; it replaced Auckland as New Zealand's capital in 1865 and is famed for the gales funnelled through Cook Strait.

Which is the highest administrative capital in the world, at about 3,650 metres?

La Paz, about 3,650 metres up, has been the seat of Bolivia's government since 1898; Sucre remains the constitutional capital but keeps only the judiciary.

Which Colombian city opened the Metrocable gondola lines serving hillside barrios in 2004?

Medellín's Metrocable Line K opened in 2004, linking steep hillside barrios with the metro below; cities such as Caracas have since built commuter gondola lines of their own.

Which city pioneered the weekly Ciclovía, closing its streets to cars on Sundays since 1974?

Bogotá's Ciclovía, begun in 1974, closes more than 100 km of streets to cars every Sunday and holiday, drawing over a million walkers and cyclists; cities worldwide have copied it.

Which is the highest capital city in Africa?

Addis Ababa sits about 2,355 metres up, higher than any other African capital; when firewood ran short in its early years, eucalyptus trees imported from Australia were planted to keep the young city where it was.

Ethiopia's capital has a name meaning what in Amharic?

Addis Ababa means 'new flower' in Amharic; Empress Taytu chose the name in 1886 when Menelik II's court moved down from chilly Mount Entoto to the springs below.

Which city was the seat of the Dalai Lamas until 1959?

Lhasa's Potala Palace housed the Dalai Lamas from 1649 until 1959, when the 14th fled to India after a failed uprising against Chinese rule; the palace is now a museum.

Mexico City is sinking because it stands on what?

A lake bed: the lake was drained from the 17th century, and as groundwater was pumped out its soft clay compacted, so parts of the city sink by almost 50 cm a year.

What was Tokyo called before 1868?

Edo, the shogunate's seat, was renamed Tokyo ('Eastern Capital') in 1868, and Emperor Meiji soon moved his court there from Kyoto.

Which rail service opened nine days before Tokyo's 1964 Olympics?

The Shinkansen 'bullet train' began running on 1 October 1964, its launch timed for the Games, and cut the Tokyo–Osaka trip from more than six hours to four.

Tokyo's core is divided into 23 self-governing districts, each with its own elected mayor, known as special what?

Wards: Tokyo City was abolished in 1943 and folded into the metropolis, so its 23 special wards now run like separate cities, each electing its own mayor and assembly.

Which station does Guinness World Records list as the world's busiest, used by millions of passengers a day?

Shinjuku Station averaged about 3.59 million passengers a day in 2018; even after the pandemic cut that to 2.7 million in 2022, it kept its Guinness record.

Which Tokyo crossing is often called the world's busiest?

Shibuya's 'scramble' stops traffic in every direction at once, so well over a thousand people can surge across together, diagonals included, each time the lights change.

Which Tokyo fish market, long the world's largest, closed in 2018 when trading moved to Toyosu?

Tsukiji's wholesale market, long the world's largest fish market, closed in October 2018 when its tuna auctions moved to Toyosu; the outer market's shops and sushi counters stayed open.

Which Indian city was officially called Bombay until 1995?

Bombay was officially renamed Mumbai in 1995 by Maharashtra's Shiv Sena state government, which saw 'Bombay' as a relic of British rule; the Marathi name honours the goddess Mumbadevi.

Calcutta became Kolkata in 2001 to match which language's pronunciation?

Bengali speakers had always called the city Kolkata; the 2001 change retired the anglicised spelling the British used while it was their Indian capital, a role it lost to Delhi in 1911.

Ho Chi Minh City is also widely known by which former name?

Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City in 1976 after the fall of South Vietnam, but the old name survives in everyday use, and the city remains Vietnam's most populous.

Kinshasa was called what from 1881 to 1966?

Henry Morton Stanley founded the post as Léopoldville in 1881 for King Leopold II of Belgium; it was renamed Kinshasa in 1966 under Mobutu's Africanisation policy.

Which name did Astana carry from 2019 to 2022?

Astana was renamed Nur-Sultan in March 2019 to honour departing president Nursultan Nazarbayev, and reverted to Astana in September 2022.

Kazakhstan's capital until 1997 was which city?

Almaty, in the far southeast, was Kazakhstan's capital until December 1997, when the government moved north to Akmola, renamed Astana in 1998.

Which planned city replaced Yangon as Myanmar's capital in 2005?

Naypyidaw, meaning 'abode of kings', became Myanmar's capital in November 2005; the government announced the new city's name only on Armed Forces Day in March 2006.

Brasília's city plan is popularly said to resemble what?

An airplane is the popular reading of Lúcio Costa's plan, with government buildings along the fuselage and housing in the wings; Costa himself said he drew a cross and bent it to fit the site.

Australia's capital was created as a compromise between which two rival cities?

Sydney and Melbourne each wanted to be capital, so the new seat had to lie in New South Wales at least 100 miles from Sydney, with Melbourne hosting the government while it was built.

Which capital was designed by American architects Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin?

Canberra was laid out to the Griffins' competition-winning 1912 plan, but Walter Burley Griffin left the project in 1920 with little more than its framework built.

Chandigarh serves as the shared capital of which two Indian states?

Chandigarh, planned by Le Corbusier in the 1950s, is a Union Territory that has served as capital of both Punjab and Haryana since Haryana was carved out of Punjab in 1966.

Which city was Pakistan's first capital?

Karachi was Pakistan's capital from independence in 1947; at the end of the 1950s the government moved north to Rawalpindi as a stopgap while the new capital, Islamabad, was built beside it.

Which European capital did a royal court leave in 1807 to rule from Brazil?

Lisbon lost its court for 13 years: fleeing a French invasion, the royal family ruled the whole empire from its own colony until John VI sailed home in 1821.

Which city on the Bay of All Saints was the first capital of colonial Brazil, from 1549 to 1763?

Salvador, founded in 1549 by governor-general Tomé de Sousa, grew rich on sugar and the slave trade; it lost the capital in 1763 after a mining boom farther south shifted Brazil's wealth.

Which is the most populous city in South America?

São Paulo stayed a minor town until coffee became Brazil's vital export crop in the late 1800s; the boom began the growth that later made it the continent's biggest city.

Which South American capital did Francisco Pizarro found in 1535 as the 'City of the Kings'?

Lima: Pizarro first made Jauja, high in the Andes, his capital, then moved it down to the coast in 1535 to be close to a port.

Argentina's capital has a name meaning what?

Buenos Aires means 'fair winds' (literally good airs), from Nuestra Señora Santa María del Buen Ayre, the Virgin invoked by Mediterranean sailors, at the city's 1536 founding.

Which Caribbean capital gathered Spain's homebound treasure fleets?

Havana's sheltered harbour made it the rendezvous for Spain's treasure ships, and by the mid-1500s the island's governor had moved there from Santiago de Cuba.

Which Australian city began in 1788 as a British penal colony, when the First Fleet landed its convicts?

Sydney: Arthur Phillip was sent to Botany Bay but rejected it within days, moving the fleet north to a cove he named after Britain's Home Secretary.

Cape Town was founded in 1652 by which trading enterprise as a way-station for its ships?

The Dutch East India Company (VOC) sent Jan van Riebeeck to found a resupply station at Table Bay in 1652; he built the Fort de Goede Hoop, the seed of Cape Town.

Who established Singapore as a British trading post in 1819?

Sir Stamford Raffles of the East India Company signed a treaty with the Sultan of Johor in February 1819 to establish the Singapore trading post; the name means lion city in Sanskrit.

Singapore became independent in 1965 after two years as part of which neighbouring country?

Malaysia: Singapore joined the federation when it formed in 1963, but clashes with the federal government over race and politics ended the union on 9 August 1965.

Singapore's official languages are English, Malay, Mandarin and which Indian language?

Tamil was chosen as the language of the largest group among Singapore's Indians, just as Mandarin and Malay stand for the Chinese and Malay communities.

Which Southeast Asian capital began in 1857 as a tin-mining settlement at a muddy river junction?

Kuala Lumpur grew where the Klang and Gombak rivers meet after Chinese tin miners arrived in 1857, and its Malay name still describes that muddy meeting of waters.

Which Asian capital has a ceremonial name so long that locals use only its first two words, Krung Thep?

Bangkok is the name foreigners use, by one account taken from a riverside village that stood there before the capital was built; Thais say Krung Thep.

Bangkok became Siam's capital in 1782, fifteen years after Burmese armies destroyed which earlier capital?

Ayutthaya fell in 1767; the court regrouped at Thonburi, then in 1782 Rama I moved it across the river, which shielded the new city from Burmese attack from the west.

Which city straddles two continents, with about two-thirds of its people in Europe?

Istanbul's rail tunnel under the Bosphorus opened in 2013, years late, largely because digging for it uncovered a buried 4th-century harbour and dozens of shipwrecks.

What was Constantinople called when Greek colonists first founded it, about a thousand years before Constantine?

Byzantium was founded by Greek colonists from Megara in the 7th century BC, by tradition under a leader named Byzas; Constantine refounded it as his capital in AD 330.

The modern name of the former Constantinople is thought to come from a Greek phrase meaning what?

Istanbul is thought to derive from the Greek phrase eis tēn polin, 'to the city', because locals simply called Constantinople 'the City'.

Which is the most populous city lying entirely in Europe?

Moscow counts about 13 million people within its limits, and in 2012 it more than doubled its own area by annexing a swathe of countryside to the southwest.

Which city has the highest population within its limits of any in the European Union?

Berlin owes its size to a 1920 law that merged the old city with dozens of surrounding towns, villages and estates, lifting its population to about 4 million.

Paris is nicknamed the City of Light partly because of its role in what?

Paris owes La Ville Lumière mainly to ideas, not lamps: it led the Age of Enlightenment, the 18th-century movement of Voltaire, Diderot and the Encyclopédie.

Which rebel queen burned Roman Londinium to the ground around AD 60?

Boudica led the Iceni in revolt after Roman officials flogged her and abused her daughters; the governor judged Londinium indefensible and left it to be burned.

What hauled London's first underground trains in 1863?

Steam locomotives filled the Metropolitan Railway with smoke and sulphurous fumes, yet the line carried 9.5 million passengers in its first year.

Who designed the schematic London Tube map in 1931?

Harry Beck, a draughtsman who drew electrical schematics for the Underground, saw his diagram rejected at first; issued as a pocket map in 1933, it was immediately popular.

London's Tube got its nickname from what?

The circular deep-level tunnels, lined with cast iron and bored from 1890 onward, gave the Tube its name; the earliest lines were cut-and-cover trenches just below the street.

Which smart card did London launch in 2003 for paying fares on the Tube and buses?

Oyster cards arrived in 2003, and from September 2014 riders could skip them entirely by tapping a contactless bank card at the gates.

Which of these metros runs trains all night, every night?

New York City Subway trains run around the clock, and despite the name about 40% of its route is above ground, on elevated lines, embankments and open cuts.

Boston's subway system is known locally as what?

Boston's MBTA is known as the T, and its CharlieCard fare pass is named after the hero of a 1940s protest song who is trapped on the city's subway.

Which was the first city in Latin America to open an underground railway, in 1913?

Buenos Aires opened Line A of its Subte in 1913, and the line's original wooden carriages stayed in service for a century, until 2013.

What is Bogotá's network of express buses, with its dedicated lanes and raised-platform stations, called?

TransMilenio opened in December 2000 after mayor Enrique Peñalosa cancelled costlier transport projects in favour of buses running in their own lanes.

Which Dutch city opened a 12,500-space bicycle garage, then the world's largest, in 2019?

Utrecht built the garage beneath the square outside Utrecht Centraal, the country's busiest station, so riders can park and walk straight into the station.

Amsterdam is the constitutional capital of the Netherlands, but the government sits in which city?

The Hague grew up around a hunting lodge of the counts of Holland and housed the Dutch Republic's States General from the 1580s, yet for centuries it held no city rights.

Which European city is home to the world's oldest 'modern' stock exchange, founded in 1602?

Amsterdam's exchange grew up in 1602 around regular trading in the shares of one newly chartered company, a market in which anyone could buy and sell a stake.

Which is Venice's oldest Grand Canal bridge?

Rialto Bridge: its wooden forerunners collapsed more than once, so Venice rebuilt it in stone by 1591, and it stayed the canal's only bridge until the 1850s.

Who brought the thousand-year Republic of Venice to an end in 1797?

Napoleon's army forced the last doge, Ludovico Manin, to abdicate on 12 May 1797, ending the Republic of Venice, which traced its origins to 697; Campo Formio then handed Venice to Austria.

Which US city's great fire of October 1871 left about a third of its residents homeless?

Chicago's legend blames Catherine O'Leary's cow for kicking over a lantern, but the cause was never established and the city council formally cleared her in 1997.

Which California city was founded in 1781 by 44 settlers?

Los Angeles's founders were no Spanish grandees: the 44 pobladores came as eleven families, and at least half had African ancestry.

Which New York City borough lies mainly on the mainland?

The Bronx sits on the mainland, while Manhattan and Staten Island are islands and Brooklyn and Queens share the western end of Long Island.

Who first popularised 'the Big Apple' as a nickname for New York in the 1920s?

Sportswriter John J. Fitz Gerald used 'the Big Apple' in his New York Morning Telegraph horse-racing columns from 1921, borrowing it from stable hands; tourism officials revived it in the 1970s.

Which settlement was razed to make way for Central Park?

Seneca Village, a mostly African-American community of about 225 people founded in 1825 near today's West 82nd–89th Streets, was seized through eminent domain in 1857 for Central Park.

Which New York bridge was the world's longest suspension bridge when it opened in 1883?

Brooklyn Bridge: a year after it opened, P. T. Barnum paraded 21 elephants across it to show a nervous public that it was safe.

The Empire State Building was the tallest building anywhere until which structure topped out in 1970?

WTC North Tower took the title in 1970; after the 2001 attacks the Empire State Building was again New York's tallest, until One World Trade Center passed it in 2012.

Which building held the world's-tallest title from 1998 to 2004?

Petronas Towers took the title on their spires alone: Chicagoans protested that the Sears Tower's top floor was higher, but spires counted and antennas did not.

Which skyscraper did the Burj Khalifa succeed as the world's tallest building?

Taipei 101 rides out typhoons and earthquakes with a 660-tonne steel sphere hung near its top, which swings to damp the tower's sway.

What was the Burj Khalifa called before its 2010 inauguration?

Known as Burj Dubai throughout construction, the tower was renamed Burj Khalifa at its January 2010 opening to honour UAE president Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed after Abu Dhabi bailed out Dubai's debts.

The Eiffel Tower was built as the centrepiece of which event?

The 1889 World's Fair got the Eiffel Tower as its centrepiece, and the tower also crowned the centenary of the French Revolution.

The Trans-Siberian Railway, the world's longest line, runs east from Moscow to which city?

Vladivostok, on the Pacific, ends a line of about 9,290 km that spans eight time zones; the future Nicholas II opened construction there in 1891.

Which word did geographer Jean Gottmann popularise in 1961 for the chain of cities from Boston to Washington?

Megalopolis: Gottmann borrowed the name of an ancient Greek town that had hoped to become a great city, and futurist Herman Kahn later dubbed the corridor 'BosWash'.

The Dutch conurbation containing Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht is called what?

Randstad means 'rim city': its towns ring a rural Green Heart, and KLM founder Albert Plesman is credited with coining the name in 1938 after seeing it from the air.

Which fruit gives its name to the urban corridor from Liverpool to Milan?

The 'Blue Banana' is the curved corridor from Liverpool through the Low Countries and the Rhine to Milan; French geographer Roger Brunet's team mapped it in 1989 as Europe's backbone.

Which writer's 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities attacked the urban planning of her day?

Jane Jacobs had no planning training, yet she coined 'eyes on the street' for the watchfulness of busy pavements and helped stop an expressway through Lower Manhattan.

Who first proposed the garden city idea, in 1898?

Ebenezer Howard set out the garden city idea in his 1898 book To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform; Letchworth (1903) and Welwyn Garden City (1920) were built on his model.

Which prefect tore down medieval Paris in the 1850s and 1860s to build its broad boulevards?

Baron Haussmann spent 17 years driving avenues, parks and sewers through the old city for the emperor, until critics of his spending forced his dismissal in 1870.

The abandoned city of Pripyat was evacuated the day after which disaster?

Pripyat's roughly 49,000 residents were bused out on 27 April 1986, about 36 hours after reactor 4 at the Chernobyl plant exploded; plant workers were later rehoused in new-built Slavutych.

Timbuktu, the ancient scholarly city, is in which modern country?

Mali's Timbuktu lost few of its manuscripts to the 2012 jihadist occupation because residents quietly moved hundreds of thousands of them to safety in Bamako.

Xi'an was known through most of its history by which name?

Chang'an's grid plan under the Tang was the model for Japan's capital Heian-kyō, today's Kyoto; the name Xi'an dates only from 1369.

Which German port on the Elbe is a city-state in its own right, officially a 'Free and Hanseatic City'?

Hamburg's title recalls its centuries in the medieval Hanseatic League, which its 1241 alliance with Lübeck helped to found; today it is one of Germany's 16 states.

Which city is nicknamed 'the city of a thousand minarets'?

Cairo began in the 10th century as a palace city built for the Fatimid caliphs, and the dynasties that followed filled it with the mosques behind its nickname.

Which South Korean planned city, named after the king who created the Korean alphabet, has housed many government ministries since 2012?

Sejong opened in 2012 to take ministries out of crowded Seoul, which stayed the legal capital after a 2004 Constitutional Court ruling blocked a full move.

Which city's port overtook Singapore's in 2010 to become the world's busiest container port?

Shanghai built much of that capacity offshore: Yangshan, a deep-water port on islands in Hangzhou Bay, is tied to the mainland by the 32.5 km Donghai Bridge.

Toronto was founded by the British in 1793 under what name?

York kept its name until 1834, when it became Toronto; American troops looted and burned it in 1813, a raid often cited as a motive for the British burning of Washington.

Which Russian city is the world's northernmost with more than a million residents?

Saint Petersburg, at about 60° N, is the northernmost city of more than a million people anywhere; Peter the Great founded it in 1703 on land taken from Sweden in the Great Northern War.

Which Roman name did the settlement that became Vienna carry?

Vindobona was a Roman army camp on the Danube; by one ancient account Marcus Aurelius died there in 180, though another places his death at Sirmium.

Which Peruvian city, about 3,400 metres up, does the country's 1993 constitution designate its 'Historical Capital'?

Cusco, the former Inca capital, is named 'Historical Capital of Peru' in the 1993 constitution; the Spanish sacked it in 1533 and rebuilt it on top of the Inca walls.