During the Tang dynasty, the city's population may have reached one million people, with some five hundred thousand inside the city walls and as many outside. They all knew that they lived in a planned and highly regulated city. Chang’an (now Xian, Shaanxi) was built by the founder of the Sui dynasty as a political statement; it was rebuilt by the Tang for the same reason. Both dynasties sought to construct a symbol of their power. Chang’an was a large city, with the outer walls stretching 9.5 kilometers (5.92 miles) long along the east-west axis and 8.4 kilometers (5.27 miles) along the north-south axis. Five meters (5 yards) high, these walls were made of pounded earth covered with bricks; they formed a perfect rectangle.

Inside the city, more walls divided it into over one hundred smaller quarters, largely for security purposes. The state compiled household registers for residents in each quarter; it used these to collect taxes and recruit soldiers. The quarters were separated by internal walls with gates that closed and opened according to curfew. Local officials maintained a complicated system of drum towers that announced the time. Special regulations governed the precise time and order in which gates were to be opened in the morning and closed at night. After the evening drum sounded, all gates were closed and locked, and no one was allowed out on the streets, which were patrolled by soldiers on horseback.

Chang'an's layout was unconventional in some ways. The city designers, who, like the royal families they served, came from a mix of Chinese and Central Asian backgrounds, felt free to modify classical prescriptions about how a Chinese city should be built. Ancient texts described the model city as one surrounded by a square wall, with the emperor's palace at the center of the city, the market to the north, and the temple to the imperial ancestors and the shrine of the earth to the south. One scholar has neatly summed up the logic of the plan: "The ruler, facing south in his audience hall, receiving his officials and conducting public business, literally turns his back on the market and thus symbolizes the lowly position which official ideology assigned to commerce."

South of the palace was the home of the central government of the Tang, which divided the tasks of governing among six ministries, called the Six Boards: Revenue, Civil Appointments, Rites, Works, Punishments, and War. These remained in use until the twentieth century. The emperor met with the heads of the Six Boards to discuss important matters of state. Other sections of the government were responsible for drafting and reviewing documents.

The Chang’an planners placed the palace flush against the north wall and allowed sufficient space for two markets to the south of the palace. The emperor and the imperial family lived in the palace in the north of the city; this was not open to the public, but almost everything else in the city was.

Chang’an is one of the few Chinese cities to retain its original layout. The visitor to Xian today can see the city walls from the Ming dynasty, rebuilt most recently with Japanese funding. The city retains its gridded street map, but the modern city within the walls takes up just one seventh of the Tang city's area—approximately the area originally covered by the emperor's palace. The enormous area of the Tang city left plenty of room for gardens and orchards, which do not survive in today's urban crush. Buddhist and Daoist monasteries were spread evenly around the city.

The center of the foreign quarter was the Western Market, around which clustered Chang'an's sizable foreign population—sometimes estimated at one-third of the city's total population. Non-Chinese residents built religious institutions dedicated to the religions of their homelands. The Persian speaking merchants continued to worship at two kinds of temples devoted to religions they brought with them from Iran. They sacrificed live animals at Zoroastrian fire altars, and they sang hymns about the forces of light triumphing over the forces of darkness at Manichaean temples. Travelers from Syria embraced their own form of Christianity, Nestorianism, which held that Christ had two different natures: the human from his mother Mary and the divine from his father the Lord.

Very few buildings from the Tang remain—just two brick pagodas to the south of the city, Little Goose and Big Goose pagodas—for the people of Chang’an did not build permanent monuments. Almost always made of wood on pounded earth foundations, buildings went up with lightning speed, as they were meant to last a generation or two at most. In 643, one official reception hall was built in only five days. In the heavily forested China of the Tang, wood was cheap and widely available. One can still see the extraordinary joint-work characteristic of Tang dynasty wooden buildings in Nara, Japan, but only because those wooden structures have been lovingly preserved while their Chinese counterparts have long since disappeared.

The visitor to Chang’an in the seventh century would have been struck by the high number of Buddhist temples: ninety-one in 722. Resident monks conducted funerals, prayed for the dead, and celebrated the various holidays of the calendar, including Buddha's birthday in the fourth month and the festival of the dead in the eighth. Because Buddhist teachings also stressed helping others, even strangers, the monks offered many services to the city's inhabitants, including free dispensaries, pawnshops, hostels, and public baths. The city hired Buddhists to run hospitals, and awarded them bonuses if less than one-fifth of their patients died.

A City of Different Social Classes

The emperor's city above all, Chang’an was built as testimony to the glory of his dynasty. It was, second, a city for officials, some of whom lived luxuriously indeed. One high official even owned a house equipped with a system of fountains that rained down on the roof in the summer and cooled those inside. The officials, who commanded enormous sums of disposable wealth, patronized the popular musical troupes of Central Asian women who played new instruments, like the pipa, similar to a guitar, and who performed at parties seated on platforms carried by camels. The city also hosted those who hoped to become officials, the exam candidates. Of the five to seven thousand candidates who arrived each year to take the examinations, some came with large allowances while others had to scrimp.



The Life of Merchants

Underneath scholars came merchants, who were banned from the civil service exams in the years before 755. Although officially, merchants were ranked below peasants and artisans, merchants were much better off than those who worked with their hands. Many envied merchants' wealth. After all, their riches made Chang’an bustle, and they brought goods all the way from Persia and India to the east and Japan to the west. Sumptuary laws restricted the size and types of decoration of merchant houses, but those involved in the lucrative trade certainly had the means to circumvent these laws.

Government officials did not limit themselves to policing the merchants' lifestyles. Far more important, they subjected the two markets of Chang’an to strict supervision. Chang'an's two markets were very big, each about one kilometer (6 miles) square. They lay at the center of two systems of transportation, one of imperial roads and one of canals. The Eastern Market specialized in locally produced goods, like salt, tea, silks, precious metals or jewels, slaves, grain, timber, and horses. The wine shops and brothels of the red-light district were in this market, where exam candidates stayed.

Officials restricted trade to authorized markets. The two markets in Chang’an each had a market director, who, with his staff, enforced a host of government regulations. The market office could punish merchants for any offense against public order. The markets opened only at noon and closed promptly at sundown. The market supervisor was supposed to check weights and measures, the quality of goods on sale, and the quality of money in circulation. Because of a chronic shortage of bronze coins (made out of copper, lead, and tin), bolts of silk served as the main currency and were sometimes supplemented by silver coins brought in from Iran.

The market supervisor was charged with preventing such unfair trading practices as cornering the market for commodities, price-fixing, or deceiving the public. Every ten days, after reviewing prices, he issued new ones for three grades of each basic commodity. Every time someone sold livestock, slaves, or land, they had to apply to his office for a certificate of sale. These regulations indicate enormous government control over commerce. Fragments of the ten-day price lists have been found in a northwest Chinese oasis, indicating that a high level of control was actually maintained.

Although Chang’an was at the end of the Silk Road, with its extraordinary level of trade in the most exotic goods, government officials remained suspicious of all those involved in long-distance trade. Many were foreigners, and Tang sculptures of the time show camels with riders of distinctly unChinese features, mustaches, and hairy eyebrows.

Viewing all merchants as potential spies, the government maintained strict surveillance over them as they went from one city to the next. They had to show their travel documents at every checkpoint they went through, and they had to prove ownership of all the animals and slaves in their caravans.


Commoners

The merchants endured a high degree of government supervision, but the life of the common people in the city was just as regulated and not nearly as comfortable. Little documentation remains concerning the lives of working people in the city. They ate simply, often only two meals a day. Families shared one or two rooms. Pawnshop records from Loyang reveal that the poor were often forced to pawn their possessions to borrow money, on which they made installment payments every two weeks. They usually pawned clothing or bolts of silk, but sometimes the items were rugs or copper mirrors.

Thousands were employed in menial jobs running shops, maintaining gardens, cleaning streets, tending horses, and peddling goods. Inadequate grain supplies posed another difficulty for the common people. Throughout the seventh century frequent canal blockages prompted the emperor to order the capital shifted from Chang'an to Loyang, a city slightly to the east and located on a better section of the canal system. The resulting moves must have burdened everyone in the city, especially the working people who had to do the carting.

The life of the common people did have its compensations. They could get medicine from Buddhist clinics not widely available elsewhere in the empire. The lunar New Year marked the coming of spring and was a time of great celebration. The fifteenth day of the first month was the lantern festival, and in 715 the emperor erected a structure 45 meters (150 feet) high laden with 50,000 lanterns for the pleasure of the city's inhabitants. On this day people did not have to go to work and they feasted, eating meat for perhaps the only time each year. The rest of the year they ate a diet of wheat and millet gruel, supplemented by vegetables. They also went outside the city on temple visits, which provided welcome respite from the drudgery of their daily lives.