Chang'an: Metropole Ostasiens und Weltstadt des Mittelalters 583-904. Teil I, Die Stadtanlage (review)

Thomas Thilo's Chang'an is a detailed study of one of China's most important cities during its most important historical period. As the title tells us, this four-hundred- page first part of two deals only with the city plan during the slightly more than three centuries that span the Sui and the Tang. Part 2, we are told in the author's foreword, will address issues of society, religion, culture, daily life, and so forth in the city. In fact, the amount of documentation about Chang'an, the size of the city, the extent of excavation there, and the extant structures or ruins from the seventh through the ninth centuries is such that, for China, a comparable or longer study so focused on urban planning might be envisioned only for Beijing in Ming and Qing times.

Thilo's introduction to issues of planning is brief. Discussion of the founding of the capital, the lay of the land, the climate, and the historical background occupies less than fifteen pages. A discussion of sources, extremely important for this kind of study, is also included in the introduction. Here the reader learns that all standard sources have been combed for information about the city plan. They include the dynastic histories (Sui shu, Tang shu, and Jiu Tang shu); Wei Shu's Tang-period Liangjing xinji; the eleventh-century record of the city, the Chang'an zhi and its fourteenth-century illustrated version, the Chang'an zhitu; the other most important Song sources, the Yonglu, Zizhi tongjian, and Taiping guangji; the nineteenth-century studies based on primary sources such as Xu Song's Tang liangjing chengfang kao; Japanese studies based on the same, such as Hiraoka Takeo's Chōan to Rakuyō; the extensive scholarly Chinese literature on Chinese urbanism such as Wang Shidian's Jinbian and Gu Yanwu's Lidai diwang zhai jingji; and the voluminous bibliography based on excavation.

The author then launches immediately into a detailed description of the city, beginning with the most pertinent features of the plan, namely walls, streets, architectural complexes, gates, and waterways. Every dimension is to be found in these pages—as is the analysis of which dimension might be more accurate when there is a dispute between texts or between the texts and the date generated by excavation. Because of the highly descriptive nature of this section—more descriptive than the rest of the book except portions of chapter 5 on city wards—the author adds a concluding section called "What the Layout Tells Us." Here, he outlines the principles of Chinese city planning, talks briefly about building materials, and makes a point that is relevant to all that follows: no Chinese structure except a pagoda, Thilo tells the reader, can be considered an independent entity.

Chapter 3 is about palaces and imperial gardens in the capital. The author rightly tells the reader that the palace is the center or locus classicus of the Chinese imperial city (pp. 39 and 42). He then proceeds to describe the palace complexes at Chang'an and the halls and other structures in them, one by one. He begins with the Taijigong, the oldest complex of the original palace city, and the building complexes to its immediate east and west, offering pertinent information and judgments in addition to dimensions and data whenever possible. Thilo writes, for example, that all imperial power was concentrated at the center front gate of the Taijigong (the North Star palace complex) (p. 43). Using textual sources mentioned in the introduction, we learn of ceremonies performed at various gates and of the purposes of or the incidents that occurred in many of the main halls. The greatest attention is given to the Daminggong; Thilo's justification is that excavation there has been extensive enough for us to have an accurate idea of what it...