I Ching
The I Ching or Yi Jing known as Classic of Changes or Book of Changes, is an ancient Chinese divination text and the oldest of the Chinese classics. Possessing a history of more than two and a half millennia of commentary and interpretation, the I Ching is an influential text read throughout the world, providing inspiration to the worlds of religion, psychoanalysis and art. A divination manual in the Western Zhou period, over the course of the Warring States period and early imperial period it was transformed into a cosmological text with a series of philosophical commentaries known as the "Ten Wings". After becoming part of the Five Classics in the 2nd century BC, the I Ching was the subject of scholarly commentary and the basis for divination practice for centuries across the Far East, took on an influential role in Western understanding of Eastern thought; the I Ching uses a type of divination called cleromancy, which produces random numbers. Six numbers between 6 and 9 are turned into a hexagram, which can be looked up in the I Ching book, arranged in an order known as the King Wen sequence.
The interpretation of the readings found in the I Ching is a matter of centuries of debate, many commentators have used the book symbolically to provide guidance for moral decision making as informed by Confucianism and Buddhism. The hexagrams themselves have acquired cosmological significance and paralleled with many other traditional names for the processes of change such as yin and yang and Wu Xing; the core of the I Ching is a Western Zhou divination text called the Changes of Zhou. Various modern scholars suggest dates ranging between the 10th and 4th centuries BC for the assembly of the text in its current form. Based on a comparison of the language of the Zhou yi with dated bronze inscriptions, the American sinologist Edward Shaughnessy dated its compilation in its current form to the early decades of the reign of King Xuan of Zhou, in the last quarter of the 9th century BC. A copy of the text in the Shanghai Museum corpus of bamboo and wooden slips shows that the Zhou yi was used throughout all levels of Chinese society in its current form by 300 BC, but still contained small variations as late as the Warring States period.
It is possible. The name Zhou yi means the "changes" of the Zhou dynasty; the "changes" involved have been interpreted as the transformations of hexagrams, of their lines, or of the numbers obtained from the divination. Feng Youlan proposed that the word for "changes" meant "easy", as in a form of divination easier than the oracle bones, but there is little evidence for this. There is an ancient folk etymology that sees the character for "changes" as containing the sun and moon, the cycle of the day. Modern Sinologists believe the character to be derived either from an image of the sun emerging from clouds, or from the content of a vessel being changed into another; the Zhou yi was traditionally ascribed to the Zhou cultural heroes King Wen of Zhou and the Duke of Zhou, was associated with the legendary world ruler Fu Xi. According to the canonical Great Commentary, Fu Xi observed the patterns of the world and created the eight trigrams, "in order to become conversant with the numinous and bright and to classify the myriad things."
The Zhou yi itself indeed says nothing about its own origins. The Rites of Zhou, however claims that the hexagrams of the Zhou yi were derived from an initial set of eight trigrams. During the Han dynasty there were various opinions about the historical relationship between the trigrams and the hexagrams. A consensus formed around 2nd century AD scholar Ma Rong's attribution of the text to the joint work of Fu Xi, King Wen of Zhou, the Duke of Zhou, Confucius, but this traditional attribution is no longer accepted; the basic unit of the Zhou yi is a figure composed of six stacked horizontal lines. Each line is either unbroken; the received text of the Zhou yi contains all 64 possible hexagrams, along with the hexagram's name, a short hexagram statement, six line statements. The statements were used to determine the results of divination, but the reasons for having two different methods of reading the hexagram are not known, it is not known why hexagram statements would be read over line statements or vice versa.
The book opens with yuán hēng lì zhēn. These four words, translated traditionally by James Legge as "originating and penetrating and firm," are repeated in the hexagram statements and were considered an important part of I Ching interpretation in the 6th century BC. Edward Shaughnessy describes this statement as affirming an "initial receipt" of an offering, "beneficial" for further "divining"; the word zhēn was used for the verb "divine" in the oracle bones of the late Shang dynasty, which preceded the Zhou. It carried meanings of being or making upright or correct, was defined by the Eastern Han scholar Zheng Xuan as "to enquire into the correctness" of a proposed activity; the names of the hexagrams are words that appear in their respective line statements, but in five cases an unrelated character of unclear purpose appears. The hexagram names could have been chosen arbitrarily from the line statements, but i
King Wen of Zhou
King Wen of Zhou was count of Zhou during the late Shang dynasty in ancient China. Although it was his son Wu who conquered the Shang following the Battle of Muye, Count Wen was posthumously honored as the founder of the Zhou dynasty and titled King. A large number of the hymns of the Classic of Poetry are praises to the legacy of King Wen; some consider him the first epic hero of Chinese history. Born Ji Chang, Wen was the son of Tairen and Ji Jili, the count of a small state along the Wei River in present-day Shaanxi. Jili was betrayed and executed by the Shang king Wen Ding in the late 12th century BC, leaving the young Chang as the count of Zhou. Wen married Taisi and fathered ten sons and one daughter by her, plus at least another eight sons with concubines. At one point, King Zhou of Shang, fearing Wen's growing power, imprisoned him in Youli after he was slandered by the Marquis of Chong, his eldest son, Bo Yikao, went to King Zhou to plead for his freedom, but was executed in a rage by lingchi and made into meat cakes which were fed to his father in Youli.
However, many officials - namely and notably San Yisheng and Hong Yao - respected Wen for his honorable governance and gave King Zhou so many gifts – including gold and women – that he released Wen, bestowed him his personal weapons and invested him with the special rank of Count of the West. In retribution, Wen offered a piece of his land in Western Luo to King Zhou, who in turn allowed Wen to make one last request, he requested that the Burning Pillar punishment be abolished, so it was. Subsequently, upon returning home Wen secretly began to plot to overthrow King Zhou. In his first year as Count of the West, he settled a land dispute between the states of Yu and Rui, earning greater recognition among the nobles, it is by this point that some nobles began calling him "king". The following year, Wen found Jiang Ziya fishing in the Pan River and hired him as a military counsellor, he repelled an invasion of the Quanrong barbarians and occupied a portion of their land. The following year, he campaigned against Mixu, a state whose chief had been harassing the smaller states of Ruan and Gong, thus annexing the three of them.
The following year, he attacked Li, a puppet of Shang, the year latter he attacked E, a rebel state opposed to Shang, conquering both. The following year he attacked Chong, home of Hu, Marquis of Chong, his arch-enemy, defeated it, gaining access to the Ford of Meng through which he could cross his army to attack Shang. By he had obtained about two thirds of the whole kingdom either as direct possessions or sworn allies; that same year he moved his capital city one hundred kilometers east from Mount Qi to Feng, placing the Shang under imminent threat. The following year, the Count of the West died before he could cross the Ford to accomplish his end. Four years from this, his second son, known as King Wu, followed his footsteps and crushed the Shang at Muye, founding the Zhou dynasty; the name "Wen" means "the Cultured" or "the Civilizing" and was made into an official royal name by King Wu in honor of his father. Many of the older odes from the Classic of Poetry are hymns in praise of King Wen.
King Wen is credited with having stacked the eight trigrams in their various permutations to create the sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching. He is said to have written the judgments which are appended to each hexagram; the most used sequence of the 64 hexagrams is attributed to him and is referred to as the King Wen sequence. In 196 BC, Han Gaozu gave King Wen the title "Greatest of All Kings". Family tree of ancient Chinese emperors Ci Hai Bian Ji Wei Yuan Hui. Shanghai Ci Shu Chu Ban She, 1979 Wu, K. C; the Chinese Heritage. Crown Publishers, 1982. ISBN 0-517-54475-X
Reconstructions of Old Chinese
Although Old Chinese is known from written records beginning around 1200 BC, the logographic script provides much more indirect and partial information about the pronunciation of the language than alphabetic systems used elsewhere. Several authors have produced reconstructions of Old Chinese phonology, beginning with the Swedish sinologist Bernard Karlgren in the 1940s and continuing to the present day; the method introduced by Karlgren is unique, comparing categories implied by ancient rhyming practice and the structure of Chinese characters with descriptions in medieval rhyme dictionaries, though more recent approaches have incorporated other kinds of evidence. Although the various notations appear to be different, they correspond with each other on most points. By the 1970s, it was agreed that Old Chinese had fewer points of articulation than Middle Chinese, a set of voiceless sonorants, labiovelar and labio-laryngeal initials. Since the 1990s, most authors have agreed on a six-vowel system and a re-organized system of liquids.
Earlier systems proposed voiced final stops to account for contacts between stop-final syllables and other tones, but many investigators now believe that Old Chinese lacked tonal distinctions, with Middle Chinese tones derived from consonant clusters at the end of the syllable. The major sources for the sounds of Old Chinese, covering most of the lexicon, are the sound system of Middle Chinese, the structure of Chinese characters, the rhyming patterns of the Classic of Poetry, dating from the early part of the 1st millennium BC. Several other kinds of evidence provide valuable clues; these include Min dialects, early Chinese transcriptions of foreign names, early loans between Chinese and neighbouring languages, families of Chinese words that appear to be related. Middle Chinese, or more Early Middle Chinese, is the phonological system of the Qieyun, a rhyme dictionary published in 601, with many revisions and expansions over the following centuries; these dictionaries set out to codify the pronunciations of characters to be used when reading the classics.
They indicated pronunciation using the fanqie method, dividing a syllable into an initial consonant and the rest, called the final. In his Qièyùn kǎo, the Cantonese scholar Chen Li performed a systematic analysis of a redaction of the Qieyun, identifying its initial and final categories, though not the sounds they represented. Scholars have attempted to determine the phonetic content of the various distinctions by comparing them with rhyme tables from the Song dynasty, pronunciations in modern varieties and loans in Korean and Vietnamese, but many details regarding the finals are still disputed. According to its preface, the Qieyun did not reflect a single contemporary dialect, but incorporated distinctions made in different parts of China at the time; the fact that the Qieyun system contains more distinctions than any single contemporary form of speech means that it retains additional information about the history of the language. The large number of initials and finals are unevenly distributed, suggesting hypotheses about earlier forms of Chinese.
For example, it includes 37 initials, but in the early 20th century Huang Kan observed that only 19 of them occurred with a wide range of finals, implying that the others were in some sense secondary developments. The logographic Chinese writing system does not use symbols for individual sounds as is done an alphabetic system. However, the vast majority of characters are phono-semantic compounds, in which a word is written by combining a character for a sounding word with a semantic indicator. Characters sharing a phonetic element are still pronounced alike, as in the character 中, adapted to write the words chōng and zhōng. In other cases the words in a phonetic series have different sounds both in Middle Chinese and in modern varieties. Since the sounds are assumed to have been similar at the time the characters were chosen, such relationships give clues to the lost sounds; the first systematic study of the structure of Chinese characters was Xu Shen's Shuowen Jiezi. The Shuowen was based on the small seal script standardized in the Qin dynasty.
Earlier characters from oracle bones and Zhou bronze inscriptions reveal relationships that were obscured in forms. Rhyme has been a consistent feature of Chinese poetry. While much old poetry still rhymes in modern varieties of Chinese, Chinese scholars have long noted exceptions; this was attributed to lax rhyming practice of early poets until the late-Ming dynasty scholar Chen Di argued that a former consistency had been obscured by sound change. This implied that the rhyming practice of ancient poets recorded information about their pronunciation. Scholars have studied various bodies of poetry to identify classes of rhyming words at different periods; the oldest such collection is the Shijing, containing songs ranging from the 10th to 7th centuries BC. The systematic study of Old Chinese rhymes began in the 17th century, when Gu Yanwu divided the rhyming words of the Shijing into ten groups. Gu's analysis was refined by Qing dynasty philologists increasing the number of rhyme groups. One of these scholars, Duan Yucai, stated the important principle that characters in the same phonetic series would be in the same rhyme group, making it possible to assign all words to rhyme groups.
A final revision by Wang Li in the 1930s produced the standard set of 31 rhyme groups. The Min dialects are believed to have split off before the Middle Chinese stage, because they contain distinctions that cannot be derived from th
Battle of Muye
The Battle of Muye or Mu was a battle fought in ancient China between the Zhou and Shang. The Zhou victory led to the Shang being replaced and subsequently justified the doctrine of the Mandate of Heaven; the victory of the Zhou led to the fall of the Shang. By the 12th century BC, Shang influence extended west to the Wei River valley, a region, occupied by clans known as the Zhou. King Wen of Zhou, the ruler of the Zhou, a Shang vassal, was given the title "Count of the West" by the King Di Xin of Shang. Di Xin used King Wen to guard his rear. Di Xin, fearing King Wen's growing power, imprisoned him. Although Wen was released, the tension between Shang and Zhou grew. Wen prepared his army, conquered a few smaller states which were loyal to Shang weakening Shang's allies. However, King Wen died in 1050 BC before Zhou's actual offensive against Shang. Di Xin paid little attention to these, as he viewed himself as the rightful ruler of China, a position appointed by the heavens, or because he was becoming engrossed with his personal life with his beautiful consort Daji, to the exclusion of all else.
King Wen's son King Wu of Zhou led the Zhou in a revolt a few years later. The reason for this delay was because King Wu believed that the "heavenly order" to conquer Shang had not been given, as well as the advice of Jiang Ziya to wait for the right opportunity. Chinese civilians supported King Wu's rebellion. In legend, Di Xin had been a good ruler, but after he married Daji, he became a ruthless ruler. Many called for the end of the Shang dynasty. With Jiang Ziya as the strategist, King Wu of Zhou led an army of about 50,000. Di Xin's army was at war in the east, but he still had about 530,000 men to defend the capital city of Yin, but to further secure his victory, he gave weapons to about 170,000 slaves to protect the capital. These slaves did not want to fight for the corrupt Shang dynasty, defected to the Zhou army instead; this event lowered the morale of the Shang troops. When engaged, many Shang soldiers did not fight and held their spears upside down, as a sign that they no longer wanted to fight for the corrupt Shang.
Some Shang soldiers joined the Zhou outright. Still, many loyal Shang troops fought on, a bloody battle followed, described in the Shijing, as translated by James Legge: The troops of Yin-shang, Were collected like a forest, And marshalled in the wilderness of Mu....'God is with you,','Have no doubts in your heart.'The wilderness of Mu spread out extensive. That morning's encounter was followed by a clear bright; the Zhou troops were much better trained, their morale was high. In one of the chariot charges, King Wu broke through the Shang's defense line. Di Xin was forced to flee to his palace, the remaining Shang troops fell into further chaos; the Zhou were victorious and showed little mercy to the defeated Shang, shedding enough blood "to float a log". After the battle Di Xin adorned himself with many valuable jewels lit a fire and burned himself to death in his palace on the Deer Terrace Pavilion. King Wu killed Daji. Shang officials were released without charge with some working as Zhou officials.
The imperial rice store was opened after the battle to feed the starving population. The battle marked the beginning of the Zhou dynasty. Wu, K. C.. The Chinese Heritage. New York: Crown Publishers. ISBN 0-517-54475-X
King Cheng of Zhou
King Cheng of Zhou or King Ch'eng of Chou was the second king of the Chinese Zhou Dynasty. The dates of his reign are 1042-1021 BCE or 1042/35-1006 BCE, his parents were King Wu of Queen Yi Jiang. King Cheng was young, his uncle, Duke of Zhou, fearing that Shang forces might rise again under the possible weak rule of a young ruler, became the regent and supervised government affairs for several years. Duke of Zhou established the eastern capital at Luoyang, defeated a rebellion by Cheng’s uncles Cai Shu, Guan Shu and Huo Shu. King Cheng stabilized Zhou Dynasty’s border by defeating several barbarian tribes along with the Duke of Zhou. Family tree of ancient Chinese emperors
Zhou dynasty
The Zhou dynasty was a Chinese dynasty that followed the Shang dynasty and preceded the Qin dynasty. The Zhou dynasty lasted longer than any other dynasty in Chinese history; the military control of China by the royal house, surnamed Ji, lasted from 1046 until 771 BC for a period known as the Western Zhou and the political sphere of influence it created continued well into Eastern Zhou for another 500 years. During the Zhou Dynasty, centralized power decreased throughout the Spring and Autumn period until the Warring States period in the last two centuries of the Zhou Dynasty. In this period, the Zhou court had little control over its constituent states that were at war with each other until the Qin state consolidated power and formed the Qin dynasty in 221 BC; the Zhou Dynasty had formally collapsed only 35 years earlier, although the dynasty had only nominal power at that point. This period of Chinese history produced; the Zhou dynasty spans the period in which the written script evolved into its almost-modern form with the use of an archaic clerical script that emerged during the late Warring States period.
According to Chinese mythology, the Zhou lineage began when Jiang Yuan, a consort of the legendary Emperor Ku, miraculously conceived a child, Qi "the Abandoned One", after stepping into the divine footprint of Shangdi. Qi was a culture hero credited with surviving three abandonments by his mother and with improving Xia agriculture, to the point where he was granted lordship over Tai and the surname Ji by his own Xia king and a posthumous name, Houji "Lord of Millet", by the Tang of Shang, he received sacrifice as a harvest god. The term Hòujì was a hereditary title attached to a lineage. Qi's son, or rather that of the Hòujì, Buzhu is said to have abandoned his position as Agrarian Master in old age and either he or his son Ju abandoned agriculture living a nomadic life in the manner of the Xirong and Rongdi. Ju's son Liu, led his people to prosperity by restoring agriculture and settling them at a place called Bin, which his descendants ruled for generations. Tai led the clan from Bin to Zhou, an area in the Wei River valley of modern-day Qishan County.
The duke passed over his two elder sons Taibo and Zhongyong to favor Jili, a warrior who conquered several Xirong tribes as a vassal of the Shang kings Wu Yi and Wen Ding before being treacherously killed. Taibo and Zhongyong had already fled to the Yangtze delta, where they established the state of Wu among the tribes there. Jili's son Wen moved the Zhou capital to Feng. Around 1046 BC, Wen's son Wu and his ally Jiang Ziya led an army of 45,000 men and 300 chariots across the Yellow River and defeated King Zhou of Shang at the Battle of Muye, marking the beginning of the Zhou dynasty; the Zhou enfeoffed a member of the defeated Shang royal family as the Duke of Song, held by descendants of the Shang royal family until its end. This practice was referred to Three Reverences. According to Nicholas Bodman, the Zhou appear to have spoken a language not different in vocabulary and syntax from that of the Shang. A recent study by David McCraw, using lexical statistics, reached the same conclusion.
The Zhou emulated extensively Shang cultural practices to legitimize their own rule, became the successors to Shang culture. At the same time, the Zhou may have been connected to the Xirong, a broadly defined cultural group to the west of the Shang, which the Shang regarded as tributaries. According to the historian Li Feng, the term "Rong" during the Western Zhou period was used to designate political and military adversaries rather than cultural and ethnic'others.' King Wu maintained the old capital for ceremonial purposes but constructed a new one for his palace and administration nearby at Hao. Although Wu's early death left a young and inexperienced heir, the Duke of Zhou assisted his nephew King Cheng in consolidating royal power. Wary of the Duke of Zhou's increasing power, the "Three Guards", Zhou princes stationed on the eastern plain, rose in rebellion against his regency. Though they garnered the support of independent-minded nobles, Shang partisans and several Dongyi tribes, the Duke of Zhou quelled the rebellion, further expanded the Zhou Kingdom into the east.
To maintain Zhou authority over its expanded territory and prevent other revolts, he set up the fengjian system. Furthermore, he countered Zhou's crisis of legitimacy by expounding the doctrine of the Mandate of Heaven while accommodating important Shang rituals at Wangcheng and Chengzhou. Over time, this decentralized system became strained as the familial relationships between the Zhou kings and the regional dynasties thinned over the generations. Peripheral territories developed local prestige on par with that of the Zhou; when King You demoted and exiled his Jiang queen in favor of the beautiful commoner Bao Si, the disgraced queen's father the Marquis of Shen joined with Zeng and the Quanrong barbarians to sack Hao in 771 BC. Some modern scholars have surmised that the sack of Haojing might have been connected to a Scythian raid from the Altai before their westward expansion. With King You dead, a conclave of nobles declared the Marquis's grandson King Ping; the capital was moved eastward to Wangcheng, marking the end of the "Western Zhou" and the beginning of the "Eastern Zhou" dynasty.
The Eastern Zhou was characterized by an accelerating collapse of royal authority, although the king's ritual importance allowed over five more cent
Luoyang
Luoyang is a city located in the confluence area of Luo River and Yellow River in the west of Henan province. Governed as a prefecture-level city, it borders the provincial capital of Zhengzhou to the east, Pingdingshan to the southeast, Nanyang to the south, Sanmenxia to the west, Jiyuan to the north, Jiaozuo to the northeast; as of the final 2010 census, Luoyang had a population of 6,549,941 inhabitants with 1,857,003 people living in the built-up area made of the city's five urban districts, all of which except the Jili District are not urbanized yet. Situated on the central plain of China, Luoyang is one of the cradles of Chinese civilization, is one of the Four Great Ancient Capitals of China; the name "Luoyang" originates from sunny side of the Luo River. Since the river flows from west to east and the sun is to the south of the river, the sun always shines on the north side of the river. Luoyang has had several names over the centuries, including "Luoyi" and "Luozhou", though Luoyang has been its primary name.
It has been called, during various periods, "Dongdu", "Xijing", or "Jingluo". During the rule of Wu Zetian, the city was known as Shendu The greater Luoyang area has been sacred ground since the late Neolithic period; this area at the intersection of the Luo river and Yi River was considered to be the geographical center of China. Because of this sacred aspect, several cities – all of which are referred to as "Luoyang" – have been built in this area. In 2070 BC, the Xia dynasty king Tai Kang moved the Xia capital to the intersection of the Luo and Yi and named the city Zhenxun. In 1600 BC, Tang of Shang defeated Jie, the final Xia dynasty king, built Western Bo, a new capital on the Luo River; the ruins of Western Bo are located in Luoyang Prefecture. In the 1036 BC a settlement named Chengzhou was constructed by the Duke of Zhou for the remnants of the captured Shang nobility; the Duke moved the Nine Tripod Cauldrons to Chengzhou from the Zhou dynasty capital at Haojing. A second Western Zhou capital, Wangcheng was built 15 km west of Chengzhou.
Wangcheng became the capital of the Eastern Zhou Dynasty in 771 BC. The Eastern Zhou Dynasty capital was moved to Chengzhou in 510 BC; the Eastern Han Dynasty capital of Luoyang would be built over Chengzhou. Modern Luoyang is built over the ruins of Wangcheng, which are still visible today at Wangcheng Park. In 25 AD, Luoyang was declared the capital of the Eastern Han Dynasty on November 27 by Emperor Guangwu of Han. For several centuries, Luoyang was the focal point of China. In AD 68, the White Horse Temple, the first Buddhist temple in China, was founded in Luoyang; the temple still exists, though the architecture is of origin from the 16th century. An Shigao was one of the first monks to popularize Buddhism in Luoyang; the ambassador Banchao restored the Silk Road in Eastern Han dynasty and this has made the capital city Luoyang the start of Silk Road In 166 AD, the first Roman mission, sent by "the king of Da Qin, Andun", reached Luoyang after arriving by sea in Rinan Commandery in what is now central Vietnam.
The late 2nd century saw China decline into anarchy: The decline was accelerated by the rebellion of the Yellow Turbans, although defeated by the Imperial troops in 184 AD, weakened the state to the point where there was a continuing series of rebellions degenerating into civil war, culminating in the burning of the Han capital of Luoyang on 24 September 189 AD. This was followed by a state of continual unrest and wars in China until a modicum of stability returned in the 220s, but with the establishment of three separate kingdoms, rather than a unified empire. In 190 AD, Chancellor Dong Zhuo ordered his soldiers to ransack and raze the city as he retreated from the coalition set up against him by regional lords all across China; the court was subsequently moved to the more defensible western city of Chang'an. Following a period of disorder, during which warlord Cao Cao held the last Han emperor Xian in Xuchang, Luoyang was restored to prominence when his son Cao Pi, Emperor Wen of the Wei dynasty, declared it his capital in 220 AD.
The Jin dynasty, successor to Wei, was established in Luoyang. When Jin was overrun by Xiongnu forces in 311 AD, it was forced to move its capital to Jiankang; the Xiongnu warriors sacked and nearly destroyed Luoyang. The same fate befell Chang'an in 316 AD. In winter 416, Luoyang fell to Liu Yu's general Tan Daoji. In 422, Luoyang was captured by Northern Wei. Liu Song general Dao Yanzhi took the city back. In 493 AD, Emperor Xiaowen of the Northern Wei dynasty moved the capital from Datong to Luoyang and started the construction of the rock-cut Longmen Grottoes. More than 30,000 Buddhist statues from the time of this dynasty have been found in the caves. Many of these sculptures were two-faced. At the same time, the Shaolin Temple was built by the Emperor to accommodate an Indian monk on the Mont Song right next to Luoyang City; the Yongning Temple, the tallest pagoda in China, was built in Luoyang. When Emperor Yang of Sui took control in 604 AD he founded the new Luoyang on the site of the existing city using a layout inspired by his father Emperor Wen of Sui's work in newly rebuilt Chang'an.
During the Tang dynasty, Luoyang was Dongdu, the "Eastern Capital", at its height had a population of around one million, second only to Chang'an, which, at the t
