Capitals That Moved: Every Capital Move since 1500 in Wikidata, Checked and Corrected, with Distances, Directions and Purpose-Built Capitals

States move their capitals more often than their apparent permanence suggests. I build a table of every move of a state's capital since 1500 that can be read from Wikidata's capital (P36) statements and their start and end qualifiers, and then check, correct and extend it by hand against cited sources. Of 2,978 capital statements for 2,295 states, only 21.3% carry a start or an end year, and 81% of present-day sovereign states have a single recorded capital. A transparent set of rules turns dated statements into 202 candidate moves since 1500; after removing 45 wrong or duplicated ones, correcting 5, confirming 22 and adding 42 that Wikidata lacks (Istanbul to Ankara, Kyoto to Tokyo, the wanderings of the Continental Congress and the Province of Canada, among others), the table holds 184 moves by 114 states, 136 lasting and 48 temporary. Every edit is documented with its source. The 20th century has the most moves (59). The median lasting move is 177 km; the longest is the Portuguese court's flight from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro in 1808 (7,716 km), and the longest lasting move Muscat to Zanzibar in 1840 (3,924 km). 17 moves went to a capital built for the purpose, 12 of them after 1900. Since 1900, 27% of lasting moves left a coastal capital for the interior, against 8% before. The status of Indonesia's planned move to Nusantara is reported as of 2026: not made. The results describe the open record as much as history, and I report its gaps throughout. Interactive version: https://maps.tristanhotham.com/moving-capitals/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/moving-capitals. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/31/moving-capitals/. Licences: paper, figures and derived data CC BY 4.0; code MIT. Wikidata is CC0; Natural Earth is public domain. I wrote the text, with drafting and editing assistance from Claude (Anthropic), which also helped prepare the analysis code. I reviewed and checked all text and results.