What was Tokyo called before 1868?

Edo, and it gave its name to two and a half centuries of Japanese history. The Tokugawa shoguns ruled from there from 1603 while the emperor remained in Kyoto as a ceremonial figure, and by the 1700s Edo was probably the largest city in the world, with a population over a million at a time when London had perhaps 600,000.

It ran on an ingenious piece of political control. The shogunate required every regional lord to spend alternate years in Edo and to leave his family there permanently when he left - hostages in all but name. The system bankrupted the nobility with the cost of maintaining two households and constant processions, built the roads, and made Edo enormous, since every lord needed a mansion and a retinue.

When the shogunate fell in 1868 the emperor moved from Kyoto and the city was renamed Tokyo, eastern capital. It has been destroyed twice since - by the 1923 earthquake and fire, which killed over 100,000, and by the firebombing of March 1945, which killed a comparable number in a single night and left almost nothing of the old wooden city standing.