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Comment by pacaro | Hacker News Reader

I have no idea about Beijing or Moscow, but Paris, Berlin, and London were all located on swamps/marshes.

Moscow region is swampy all right. And I've heard that Washington DC (being an artificial capital) is located on a swamp too.

I think the reason is simple, "Braindead" style. It's just that lizard folk prefer the marshes, so that's where we have to be.

The reason is simple. Swamps are commercially strategic, since they're located on rivers.

For most of history, shipping goods over land didn't make much sense.

This makes perfect sense, I guess they are swamps because that's the combination of rivers and flat ground

We would have Berlin on Rhine and Moscow on Volga river then. Much better climate and much busier rivers commercially.

For some reason, capitals tend to be on undesirable rivers.

...if this was the only condition for "what city becomes a capital." Looking at Germany, there's Hamburg, Köln, München...all on nice rivers, but none of them were the capital of Prussia when Germany was first unified - since Prussia was the essential driver of that political process, Berlin became the capital. Something of a coincidence in the grand scheme of things, really.

For some reason, it's usually a faraway landlocked province that triggers unification. Not the rich and coastal ones.

Turin-Savoy in Italy, Prussia in Germany.

Hence the "Drain the swamp" political rhetoric of the last US election cycle.

FWIW, Berlin and Moscow both mean "Swamp Town".

Canberra also.

Beijing has multiple rivers traversing the current municipal area, and they were dammed and directed into channels, or directed underground as the city grew (same for London, by the way - London has multiple historical rivers that are now entirely or almost entirely underground, not just the Thames)

Moscow is located on a big river that used to be a major trade route.

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