Chinese Empire

The Layout of Tang Chang’an: The Largest City in the Eighth-Century World

The capital of the Tang dynasty, Chang’an (長安, “Long Peace”), was the largest and most influential city in the world for most of the eighth century CE. At its peak, it covered about 84 square kilometres — roughly six times the area of contemporary Constantinople — and housed close to a million inhabitants. It was the eastern terminus of the Silk Road and the model for capital planning throughout East Asia. The city’s gridded, axially-symmetrical plan influenced the Japanese capital at Heian-kyō (modern Kyoto), the Korean capital at Gyeongju, and the Vietnamese capital at Hue more than a thousand years later. The wider context of Chinese architecture is surveyed in our overview, and the political architecture of the empire in palaces, capital cities, and the Great Wall.

The Sui Founding of Daxingcheng

The Tang capital was not, strictly speaking, a Tang foundation. The city was originally laid out as Daxingcheng (大興城, “Great New City”) in 582 CE by the Sui emperor Wen (r. 581–604), to replace the old Han-Chang’an, destroyed in the fighting at the end of the Western Jin dynasty. The designer was the imperial architect Yuchi Jiong (宇文愷), a Sui official who had previously served as an engineer on several major building projects.

Yuchi Jiong’s plan was a masterpiece of geometric regularity. The city was laid out as a perfect rectangle, oriented to the cardinal directions, with the Longitudinal Streets running north-south and the Transverse Streets running east-west. The wall was built of rammed earth, faced with brick, and surrounded by a moat. The city had three gates on the south, three on the north, two on the east, and two on the west — a total of nine gate-towers, each connected to a major street that ran through the wall as an imperial road.

The Sui, having completed the Grand Canal in 610 CE (treated in our article on the construction of the Grand Canal), made Daxingchang the political centre of the unified empire. The Sui also built a smaller secondary capital at Luoyang, on the central plain, which served as a working capital for the eastern half of the empire.

The Tang Capital: Daxingcheng Rebuilt as Chang’an

When the Tang replaced the Sui in 618, the capital was largely preserved. The Tang continued to use the Sui gridded plan but rebuilt and expanded many of the major buildings. The new city was given the name Jingdu (京師, “Capital”) or simply Chang’an, the name of the old Han capital further north. The Tang also moved the imperial palace complex outside the walls of the main city, building the Daming Palace on a low rise to the northeast. The interior was divided by 11 longitudinal streets and 14 transverse streets into a regular grid. The central north-south street — the Imperial Way (朱雀大街, Zhuque Dajie) — was 155 metres wide, by far the widest street in the world at that time and a clear marker of the imperial axis. The other longitudinal streets were 60 to 120 metres wide.

The Imperial City and the Wards

The interior of Chang’an was divided into two principal parts: the Imperial City (皇城, Huangcheng) in the centre-north, and the residential and commercial districts that surrounded it on three sides. The Imperial City was a smaller walled enclosure, 4.5 kilometres north-to-south and 2.7 kilometres east-to-west. Within it stood the great government offices, the imperial ancestral temples, the imperial granaries, and the residence of the heir apparent.

The residential and commercial districts were divided into 108 walled wards (坊, fang) by the gridded streets. Each ward was surrounded by a low wall, with a gate closed at night. The wards were the basic unit of urban administration: each was responsible for policing, fire prevention, public health, and tax collection. The standard residential ward was about 0.5 square kilometres and housed perhaps 2,000 to 3,000 people.

The gridded ward plan was deliberately rigid, both for administrative efficiency and for political control. The Tang government was acutely aware of the danger of urban unrest, and the close, walled wards were easy to seal off and to police. The plan was very different from the open, organic city forms of medieval Europe, and from the more open form of the later Song and Yuan capitals.

The Two Markets

Two great markets served the city, the Eastern Market (東市, Dongshi) and the Western Market (西市, Xishi). Both were large walled enclosures, each about 1 kilometre square, on the eastern and western sides of the city. The Eastern Market was the official, government-supervised market for luxury goods, fine fabrics, gold and silver, jewels, and imported items. The Western Market was the more popular, less regulated market, where foreign merchants and ordinary citizens traded.

The markets were the commercial heart of the city. They were surrounded by shops, inns, restaurants, and warehouses, and opened at fixed hours. The Western Market was famous for its foreign merchants: Sogdians, Persians, Arabs, Turks, and Koreans traded here, and the goods on sale came from as far away as the Byzantine Empire, Persia, and India. The city hosted Nestorian Christian, Zoroastrian, and Manichaean temples, as well as Buddhist monasteries of all the major Chinese schools. The Japanese monk Ennin, who lived in Chang’an from 838 to 847, left a detailed account of the city.

The Daming Palace

The Daming Palace (大明宮, “Great Bright Palace”) was the principal residence of the Tang emperor and the ceremonial centre of the dynasty. It was built in 634 CE on a low rise called Longqingyuan in the northeast of the city, just outside the main city wall, and was rebuilt and expanded several times in the eighth century. The palace covered about 3.2 square kilometres, making it one of the largest palace complexes ever built. Its central audience hall, the Hanyuan Hall (含元殿), sat on a high platform reached by a long ramped approach; it was a single-storey timber structure with a row of tall columns supporting a deep eaved roof, and the most imposing building in the city.

The Daming Palace also contained the Huaqing Palace in the mountains to the east, a hot-springs retreat used by the Tang emperors; the Linde Hall, a state banquet hall; and the Penglai Hall, a smaller private residence. The palace was abandoned in 904 CE when the Tang court was forced to flee Chang’an, and was largely destroyed in the following years. The site, on the northern edge of modern Xi’an, is now a public park, and the foundations of the Hanyuan Hall and the long ramped approach are still visible.

The Fall of Tang Chang’an

The Tang capital survived as the imperial capital until 904 CE, but the city had been in decline for a century. The An Lushan Rebellion of 755–763 had devastated the north China plain, and although Chang’an itself was not sacked, the population fell sharply. The later Tang emperors spent much of their time at Luoyang to the east, and Chang’an was largely abandoned as a capital after 904. The Ming and Qing used Beijing as the capital, and Chang’an shrank to a regional centre, renamed Xi’an in the Ming. The Tang gridded plan is still partly visible in the modern street plan of Xi’an, and the Ming city wall is still standing.

The influence of Tang Chang’an on East Asian capital planning was profound. The Japanese capital at Nara (710–784) and the new capital at Heian-kyō (later Kyoto, founded 794) were both consciously modelled on Tang Chang’an, with a similar gridded ward plan and an Imperial Way on the central axis. The Korean capital at Gyeongju and the later capital at Hanyang (Seoul) followed the same pattern. In China itself, the gridded, axially-symmetrical, ward-based plan became the standard for new imperial capitals throughout the rest of the imperial era.