Chang'an
Chang'an, located in China's Shaanxi Province, was the capital city of several Chinese dynasties, including the Western Han and the Tang, from 202 BC to 907 AD. At various times, it was the largest city in the world. Its name was subsequently changed, and during the Ming dynasty period its modern name of Xi'an was adopted.
The site of Chang'an south of the Wei River in central Xi'an has been inhabited since Neolithic times, when the Yangshao culture had a major center at Banpo to its south during the 5th millennium BC. Fenghao, the twin capitals of the Western Zhou, straddled the Feng River to its southwest from the 11th to 8th centuries BC and the state of Qin and its imperial dynasty had their capital in nearby Xianyang, north of the Wei, in the 4th and 3rd centuries BC. The First Emperor's mausoleum and its Terracotta Army lay to its east.
Liu Bang moved his court to the Changle Palace in 200 BC, soon after the establishment of the Western Han. It held a central position in the large but easily defended Guanzhong Region, near but outside the ruins of the Qin Xianyang and Epang Palaces. Han Chang'an grew up to the north of it and the adjacent Weiyang Palace. Weiyang continued to serve as the imperial palace of the Xin, late Eastern Han, Western Jin, Han-Zhao, Former Qin, Later Qin, Western Wei, Northern Zhou, and early Sui dynasties and became the largest palace ever built, covering nearly seven times larger than the Forbidden Citybefore its destruction under the early Tang. The main areas of Sui and Tang-era Chang'an was south of the earlier settlement and southeast of Weiyang. Around750 AD, Chang'an was called a "million-man city" in Chinese records; most modern estimates put the population within the walls of the Tang city at around 800,0001,000,000. The 742 AD census recorded in the New Book of Tang listed the population of Jingzhao, the province including the capital and its metropolitan area, as 1,960,188 people in 362,921 households and modern scholarsincluding Charles Benn and Patricia Ebreyhave concurred that Chang'an and its immediate hinterland could have supported around 2,000,000 people.
Amid the Fall of Tang, the warlord Zhu Wen forcibly relocated most of the city's remaining population to Luoyang in 904 AD. Chang'an was of minor importance in the following centuries but again became a regional center under the Northern Song. Its name was changed repeatedly under the Mongol Yuan dynasty before the Ming settled on Xi'an and erected its city walls around the former Sui and Tang palace district, an area about an eighth the size of the medieval city at its height.
History
Zhou and Qin period
The site of Chang'an south of the Wei River in central Xi'an has been inhabited since Neolithic times, when the Yangshao culture had a major center at Banpo to its south from around 5000 to around 4300 BC and other sites in the area for several more centuries. Fenghao, the twin capitals of the Western Zhou, straddled the Feng River to its southwest from to 771 BC and the state of Qin and its imperial dynasty had their capital in nearby Xianyang, north of the Wei, from 350 to 207 BC. The First Emperor's mausoleum and its Terracotta Army lay beside Mount Li to its east. Chang'an itself existed as a small village under the Qin.Han period
Upon the Fall of Qin and the resolution of the Chu–Han Contention with the establishment of the Han dynasty in 202 BC, the emperor Liu Bang initially ruled from Luoyang, the site of the Eastern Zhou capital Chengzhou and supposed center of the world. This was in accordance with the majority of his advisors, themselves mostly from eastern China. Upon reflection, however, he heeded the advice of a soldier Lou Jing and his general Zhang Liang that the Guanzhong Regionthe Zhou and Qin heartland along the Wei Rivercould provide for a larger core population and offered much greater natural protection against potential unrest. Additionally, Chang'an was far more centrally located in the lands directly administered by the Han emperor and much further from their border with the realm's notionally vassal kings.Liu Bang commissioned his chancellor Xiao He to rehabilitate the Qin's Xingle Palace for use as his primary court in the 9th month of Year 5 of his reign as king of Han. This was completed as the 7×7li Changle Palace in the 2nd month of Year 7, by which time Xiao He had already begun renovating the Zhangtai Palace as the 5×7li Weiyang Palace. According to Sima Qian's Records, Liu Bang returned to Chang'an in that year, initially reproaching his minister for the needless extravagance of constructing such enormous palaces in such close proximity to one another. Xiao He successfully argued, however, that the magnificence was necessary to overawe Liu's rivals and affirm the legitimacy of the dynasty. Around the same time, thousands of clans in then military aristocracy were forcibly relocated to the region. The minister Liu Jing described this policy as "weakening the root while strengthening the branch", but it served to keep potential rivals where they could be more easily observed and redirected their energy towards defending the new capital against the nearby Xiongnu. The Weiyang Palace was initially completed in 198 BC, but Liu Bang continued to rule from the Changle Palace for the remainder of his life. Subsequent emperors ruled from Weiyang while using Changle to house their mothers, wives, and concubines. An arsenal was placed directly between the two palaces to protect them and the nascent city.
The Han capital was located northwest of Xi'an under the Ming and Qing, although the modern city has expanded to include it. Chang'an had a population of 146,000 in 195 BC, when Liu Bang's son and successor Liu Ying began work on the city walls. He completed the walls in September 191 BC, having used 146,000290,000 workers serving 30-day corvées, as well as 20,000 convicts on continual work detail. The city itself was largely completed by 189 BC, its walls, streets, and buildings constructed at a 2° difference in alignment from the grid used within the palaces. The wide main avenues were lined with locust, poplar, cypress, and other trees. Given the importance of square shapes in ancient Chinese urban planning, the irregular shape of the walls of Han-era Chang'an was the subject of debate for centuries. The effort of Qin-era palaces to reconstruct astrological designs led to a common theory that the wall attempted to mimic the Little Dipper asterism. Just as likely, however, the northern wall protected existing buildings along the Wei River and the irregular southern extensions were forced on the city by the large palaces built on Qin-era terraces. Liu Ying also removed the ancestral temples from the city, placing them beside the imperial tomb complexes instead; this arrangement was maintained throughout the Western Han.
Emperor Wu began a third phase of construction which peaked in 100 BC with the construction of many new palaces. He also added the nine temples complex south of the city, and built the park. In 120 BC, Shanglin Park, which had been used for agriculture by the common people since Liu Bang was sealed off, was turned into an imperial park again. In the center of the park was a recreation of the three islands of the immortals mentioned in the Classic of Mountains and Seas: Penglai, Yingzhou, and Fangzhang. This became a theme in Chinese gardening, with the idea of "one pond, three hills" being subsequently employed in Hangzhou's West Lake, the Forbidden City's Taiye Lake, and the Summer Palace's Kunming Lake. By the time he was finished, the area within the city walls was fully two-thirds occupied by imperial palaces and nearly three-fourths of China's nobility lived in Chang'an or its vicinity.
Also during the reign of Emperor Wu, the diplomat Zhang Qian was dispatched westward into Central Asia. Subsequently, Ching'an was the political, economic, and cultural center of China as well as the cosmopolitan eastern terminus of the overland Silk Road. It was a consumer city, a city whose existence was not primarily predicated upon manufacturing or trade but upon its role as the political and military center of China. By the AD 2 census, the population of the walled city was recorded as 246,200 in 80,000 households and the population of the entire metropolitan region reckoned as 682,000. Much of this population consisted of the scholar gentry class whose education was being sponsored by their wealthy aristocratic families. In addition to these civil servants, there was a larger underclass to serve them.
During the short-lived Xin dynasty of Wang Mang, he attempted to bring the design of the palaces and city in closer alignment to the idealized plans recorded in the, an apocryphal addition to the Book of Zhou. He razed Emperor Wu's Jianzhang Palace but constructed additional temples south of the city. During the Lülin peasant rebellion that ended his reign, Chang'an was captured and sacked on 4 October AD 23 and Wang was killed and beheaded by the rebels two days later. The Eastern Han government subsequently settled on Luoyang as their new primary capital while Chang'an continued to occasionally be referenced as the Western Capital or Xijing. In the year 190, the Han court was seized and returned to Chang'an by the notorious chancellor Dong Zhuo, primarily as a strategically superior site against the insurgency mounting against him. After Dong's death in 192, the capital was moved back to Luoyang in August 196 and then to Xuchang in the autumn of 196.
Jin, Sixteen Kingdoms, and Northern Dynasties period
During the fall of the Western Jin dynasty, Chang'an was made the Jin capital from 312 to 316 as they began to lose control over northern China. The city was conquered by the Han-Zhao in 316, signalling the end for the Western Jin and the beginning of the Eastern Jin in the south at Jiankang. Later on, Chang'an served as the capital of the Han-Zhao, Former Qin and Later Qin. Under the Later Qin ruler, Yao Xing, Chang'an became an important hub for Buddhism in China.The Eastern Jin briefly recovered Chang'an in 417 during the second northern expedition of Liu Yu, but was lost to the Helian Xia in 418. The city finally fell into the hands of the Northern Wei dynasty in 426 and remained under their control for more than a century. When the Wei was split in two, Chang'an became the capital of Western Wei, and also of its successor state Northern Zhou.