Chinese Empire

Palaces, Capital Cities, and the Great Wall

The political architecture of imperial China took three principal forms: the palace at the heart of each capital, the capital city that surrounded it, and the walls — both the walls of individual cities and the long defensive walls of the empire as a whole. All three were designed to project a single idea: that the emperor was the Son of Heaven, his capital the centre of the world, and his borders the edge of civilisation. The most ambitious projects in each category — the Forbidden City at Beijing, the Tang capital at Chang’an, and the Great Wall — are still among the most recognisable monuments in the world and are visited by tens of millions of tourists every year.

This article surveys the political architecture of imperial China. It begins with the imperial palace, traces the evolution of the capital city from the Han and Tang to the Ming and Qing, and turns finally to the Great Wall, whose different phases — from the rammed-earth walls of the Warring States to the brick-and-stone walls of the Ming — are themselves a compressed history of Chinese engineering. The most elaborate surviving palace, the Forbidden City in Beijing, has its own dedicated article, and so does the most ambitious medieval city, Tang Chang’an. For the broader context of Chinese architecture, see our comprehensive overview, and for the engineering of canals, bridges, and weapons, see engineering marvels of imperial China.

The Imperial Palace

The imperial palace was the centre of the Chinese state, and the most carefully regulated of all Chinese building types. It always stood on the central axis of the capital, on the highest ground within the city, and was surrounded by a high red wall. Within the wall, a sequence of gates, courtyards, and halls progressed northward toward the throne hall, with the emperor’s private quarters behind the throne hall and the imperial family’s residence to east and west. The plan was deliberately hard to read from outside and easy to defend.

The Weiyang Palace of Han Chang’an

The earliest palace complex whose scale we can estimate is the Weiyang Palace (未央宮) of the Western Han capital at Chang’an, on the northwest edge of modern Xi’an. Built in 200 BCE by the architect-emperor Liu Bang’s chancellor Xiao He, the Weiyang Palace covered an area of about 4.8 square kilometres, roughly the size of the entire city of Pompeii. Its main audience hall, the Qianzheng Hall, was, by Han accounts, so large that ten thousand of the emperor’s officials could be seated within it, and the pillars were said to have been of camphor wood from south China. No trace of it survives above ground; archaeology has recovered only the platform foundations and some fragments of tile.

The Weiyang Palace set the pattern for later Chinese imperial palaces: axial plan, high wall, sequence of gates and halls, the throne hall at the centre, the imperial residence behind, and the ancestral temples nearby. The pattern recurred in every later Chinese capital.

The Daming Palace of Tang Chang’an

The Tang dynasty moved the imperial palace outside the walls of Chang’an and built the Daming Palace (大明宮) on a low rise to the northeast. Built in 634 CE and reconstructed several times in the eighth century, the Daming Palace covered about 3.2 square kilometres and was, by some accounts, the largest palace complex ever built in the world. Its central audience hall, the Hanyuan Hall (含元殿), sat on a high platform with a sweeping ramped approach; it was a single-storey timber structure, but its great eaves and tall platform made it appear to be on a par with the multi-storey buildings that dominated medieval European palaces. The Phoenix Hall (Zhuque Men), the imperial residence, the Linde Hall for state banquets, and the Huaqing Pool hot springs complex in the mountains to the east were all part of the same palace network.

The Tang capital at Chang’an as a whole is treated in our dedicated article. It is the most ambitious capital in Chinese history and the only one that came close to its ideal of an ordered, gridded, axially-symmetrical imperial city.

The Forbidden City of Ming and Qing Beijing

The Forbidden City (紫禁城) in Beijing, the only major Chinese imperial palace to survive largely intact, was built between 1406 and 1420 for the Yongle Emperor of the Ming. It occupies a rectangular walled enclosure 961 metres north-to-south and 753 metres east-to-west, an area of about 72 hectares in the centre of Beijing. Its outer wall is 10 metres high, with a 52-metre-wide moat. Within the wall, a sequence of gates and courtyards leads northward through the Gate of Supreme Harmony to the Hall of Supreme Harmony, the throne hall where the emperor held court, and then to the emperor’s private residence at the north end of the complex. The plan is described in detail in our article on the Forbidden City.

The Forbidden City became the residence of 24 emperors — 14 of the Ming and 10 of the Qing — until the abdication of the boy-emperor Puyi in 1912. It survived the turmoil of the twentieth century largely because of its conversion into the Palace Museum in 1925, and it is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the most-visited museum complex in the world.

The Capital City

The Chinese capital was a heavily fortified, ritualised, axially-laid-out city whose plan embodied the Confucian cosmic order. Almost every Chinese capital was rectangular, aligned on a north-south axis, surrounded by a high wall, and entered through a gate-tower in the middle of each side. Within the wall, a regular grid of streets defined residential wards, and the imperial palace occupied a defined position, usually in the centre or the north of the city.

The Han Capital at Chang’an

The Han capital at Chang’an, founded in 200 BCE and used (with interruptions) for the next eight centuries, was the largest city in the world for much of its existence. It was surrounded by a roughly rectangular wall about 25.7 kilometres in perimeter, enclosing an area of about 36 square kilometres. The Weiyang Palace occupied the southwest of the walled area, the Changle Palace the east, the imperial ancestral temples the north, and the markets and residential wards filled the space between. Archaeological surveys have revealed the foundations of the wall, parts of nine city gates, and the outlines of the principal palaces and ceremonial buildings.

The Tang Capital at Chang’an

The Tang rebuilt the Sui capital in its present form in 582–583 and made it the model for East Asian capital planning. The Tang city was about 9.7 kilometres north-to-south and 8.6 kilometres east-to-west, with a perimeter wall of about 36 kilometres, enclosing 84 square kilometres — roughly six times the area of contemporary Constantinople. Inside, a regular grid of streets divided the city into 108 walled residential wards, plus the Daming Palace in the northeast, the imperial city in the centre-north, and two large markets in the east and west. The plan see our article on the layout of Tang Chang’an.

Tang Chang’an was the largest city in the world for most of the eighth century, and the only one with a population approaching a million. Its gridded plan, and the symmetrical location of palace, ancestral temples, and markets, were deliberately copied by the Japanese at Nara in the eighth century and at Heian-kyō (modern Kyoto) in 794, and the influence can be traced, in modified form, in capitals as far away as the Vietnamese imperial city of Hue in the nineteenth century.

Luoyang: The Eastern Capital

Throughout imperial Chinese history, the capital was often paired with a secondary “eastern capital” or “southern capital” used for periodic visits, retreat, and as a backup. The most important of these was Luoyang, on the Luo River near the Yellow River’s southern bank, which served as the main or eastern capital for the Eastern Han, the Western Jin, the Northern Wei, the Sui, and the late Tang. The Sui rebuilt Luoyang on a gridded plan similar to Chang’an’s, and the Tang made it a regular secondary capital. Its location, between the grain-producing south and the politically active north, made it a strategic choice.

The Song Capitals: Bianjing and Lin’an

The Northern Song capital at Bianjing (modern Kaifeng), founded in 960 and developed over the next 167 years, was the largest city in the world for much of the eleventh century. Unlike the gridded plan of Chang’an, Bianjing was a dense, organic, multi-centred city, with no imperial city wall separating the palace from the rest of the city. Its commercial districts, market halls, restaurants, and entertainment quarters were famously lively, and Song painters have left vivid pictures of the multi-storey timber buildings that lined its streets. Bianjing was sacked by the Jurchen in 1127, and the court fled south to found the Southern Song capital at Lin’an (modern Hangzhou), which was similarly dense and commercial but also beautifully integrated with the natural scenery of West Lake.

The Song capitals have not survived, but the Song capital of Pingjiang (modern Suzhou) has been partially reconstructed from the famous Pingjiang Map of 1229, a stone-carved plan of the city. The map shows a dense, water-based city of canals and bridges, with the markets and temples scattered along the main thoroughfares.

Yuan Dadu and the Ming-Qing Capital of Beijing

The Mongol Yuan built a new capital, Dadu (大都, “Great Capital”), on the site of modern Beijing in 1267. It was a gridded city, with the imperial palace at its centre, surrounded by a rectangular wall. The Ming drove out the Mongols in 1368 and initially set their capital at Nanjing, but the Yongle Emperor moved it to Beijing in 1421, rebuilding the city and the palace on the Yuan site. The result is the present city of Beijing: a roughly square walled enclosure, with the Forbidden City in the centre, the imperial altars of the Temple of Heaven to the south, the Temple of Earth to the north, the Temple of the Sun to the east, and the Temple of the Moon to the west. This cosmic arrangement, with the imperial palace at the centre and the four seasonal altars at the cardinal points, embodied the Confucian cosmic order in stone and tile.

The Qing inherited the Ming capital at Beijing and made few changes to the main plan. They added the Outer City to the south, expanding the walled area, and rebuilt several of the gates and gate-towers in a more elaborate style. The city walls and gates stood until the 1950s and 1960s, when most were demolished to make way for roads; the surviving Tiananmen and Front Gate (Qianmen) are now surrounded by modern Beijing.

City Walls

Almost every Chinese city, large or small, was surrounded by a wall. The earliest city walls, known from Shang and Zhou archaeology, were built of rammed earth (hangtu, 夯土), a technique in which moist earth was pounded between wooden forms to form a dense, hard mass. By the Han period, walls were faced with brick or stone, and by the Tang the standard form was a brick or stone facing on a rammed-earth core. The Ming rebuilt many of the surviving city walls in solid brick, and these are the city walls that survive today in places like Xi’an, Nanjing, and Pingyao.

The standard Chinese city wall was a rectangle, with a gate-tower in the middle of each side, corner towers at the four corners, and crenellations along the top. The gates were the most elaborate elements, often protected by an outer barbican (瓮城, wengcheng) — a small walled enclosure in front of the gate, where an attacker who breached the outer wall would be trapped under fire from above. The most elaborate surviving example is the Xi’an city wall, rebuilt in the late Ming and now fully restored.

The Great Wall

The Great Wall (長城, Changcheng) is the most ambitious defensive project in the history of architecture. It is not a single structure but a long sequence of walls, rebuilt and extended by more than twenty dynasties over more than two thousand years, along the northern frontier of the Chinese empire. The total length of all the surviving sections, including the many warring-states walls that were connected together and the long Ming wall, is more than 21,000 kilometres.

The Warring-States Walls

The earliest Chinese walls were built by the warring states of the late Zhou period to defend against their rivals and against the steppe nomads of the north. The Qi state built a wall across the Shandong peninsula, the Wei state built walls along the Yellow River, the Yan state built walls in the Hebei mountains, and the Qin state, on the western frontier, built the earliest version of what would become the Great Wall. These walls were made of rammed earth or, in rocky terrain, of piled stones, and they were built to be manned by garrison troops rather than to be impregnable.

The Qin Wall

In 220 BCE, after unifying the warring states, the First Emperor ordered the existing walls of the former states to be connected into a single defensive system. The result was a continuous wall running from the western frontier (in modern Gansu) through the Ordos loop and into the Hebei mountains, with watchtowers every few kilometres. The wall was built of rammed earth, faced in places with stone, and was reportedly manned by 300,000 soldiers. The Qin wall, like the Qin dynasty itself, did not last long, but it set the pattern for the rest of Chinese history: the wall, the garrison, the signal towers, and the agricultural colonies that supported the frontier.

The Han Wall

The Han dynasty extended the wall far to the west, into the Hexi Corridor and eventually toward the Pamir Mountains, securing the trade routes of the Silk Road. The Han wall was built partly of rammed earth, partly of stone, and partly of bundles of reeds in the desert sections. The Han also built a series of fortified cities — Wuwei, Zhangye, Jiuquan, Dunhuang — along the corridor, and a system of signal towers that could pass messages from the capital to the western frontier in a matter of days.

The Ming Wall

The Ming wall, built in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, is the wall we know today. It was built in response to the Mongol threat after the Ming drove the Yuan out of China in 1368, and was rebuilt several times, most intensively in the late fifteenth century under the Hongzhi and Zhengde emperors and again in the sixteenth century under the Jiajing emperor. The Ming wall is the only Chinese wall built largely in brick and stone; the earlier walls were almost all of rammed earth.

The Ming wall runs from Jiayuguan in the west (the “First Pass Under Heaven”, where the wall meets the desert) to Shanhaiguan on the Bohai Sea in the east (the “First Pass of the Sea”). Its total length, including the many branches and parallel walls, is about 8,850 kilometres. Along its course it has more than 10,000 watchtowers, garrison towns, and signal towers. The wall is up to 9 metres high and 6 metres wide at the top, faced with fired brick. It is a masterwork of Ming military engineering and an astonishing feat of labour mobilisation.

The Great Wall did not, in the end, prevent invasions. The Mongols broke through it several times in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the Manchus crossed it in 1644. But it served as a garrison line, a trade corridor, a postal route, and a symbolic boundary between the Chinese world and the steppe, and it has become, in the modern imagination, the most iconic symbol of Chinese civilisation.

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