According to "Jiangning Local Records City Examination", it was newly built in the early Ming Dynasty, but the only three gates in the capital, South Gate, Daxi and Shuixi, were still there, and their names were changed. The south gate here is today's Zhonghua Gate, and the west gate is Shicheng Gate.
As early as the 12th year of Yangwu Tianyou (9 15), when Jinling Fucheng was built, the city gate located in the west of the city had begun to take shape, and it was called Daximen at that time. After the reconstruction and expansion of the Southern Tang Dynasty, it lasted for more than 400 years in the Song and Yuan Dynasties. By the time Zhu Yuanzhang built the city wall, he had extensively consulted the maps of jiangning house in Southern Tang Dynasty, Jiankang House in Song Dynasty and the road clearing map in Yuan Dynasty. During these 400 years, only the name was slightly changed, and the Great West Gate evolved into the West Gate.
To the north of this gate is the famous Stone Mountain (now called Liang Qingshan) in Nanjing. On the mountain, there are Jinling Yi City of Chu State in the Eastern Zhou Dynasty and Stone City built by Sun Quan, the first emperor of Jinling. Climbing the tower, Shicheng can be seen in a glance. The rulers of the Ming Dynasty hoped that this gate would be as solid as a rock and as solid as a stone city, so they renamed the Great West Gate as the Stone City Gate.
Why is it called Han Ximen? This goes back to the Southern Tang Dynasty. After Taizu Li Bian made Nanjing its capital, he named the city gate built in the west of the city and close to the traffic artery of the Inner Qinhuai River as Longguangmen, also known as Xiashuimen, and the people called it Shuiximen. It was not until the Yuan Dynasty that the name Shuiximen was officially accepted. After checking the Yuanjiqing road map, Shuiximen has appeared on the map as an official symbol. In the early Ming Dynasty, after the wall was built, Zhu Yuanzhang renamed Shuiximen Sanshanmen, but people still habitually called it Shuiximen. At the same time, people are not used to calling Shichengmen. In order to show the difference and correspondence, they called it the West Gate of Drought. A flood, a drought, but also the image.
In the Qing Dynasty, I don't know whether it was due to the need of the Qing Dynasty's Huairou policy or the subtle influence of the anti-Qing sentiment, Hanximen gradually evolved into Hanximen, which was always used by the people.