Chang’an Was Open to the World. Who Could Get In?

LECTURE LEARNING OBJECTIVES

1. Describe how the plan of Chang'an (walls, wards, markets, and a palace at the north) organized movement, trade, worship, and imperial power.
2. Explain how official roads, Tang expansion, and long-distance trade brought envoys, merchants, pilgrims, and religious communities to the capitals.
3. Identify concrete examples of cultural exchange in religion, dress, entertainment, and music, and explain who took part in them.
4. Analyze why the end of the Nine Rank System and the growth of examinations broadened the elite without replacing old family privilege.
5. Evaluate the claim that Tang cosmopolitanism meant social openness, using evidence about both the city and the elite.

Introductory Framing

A visitor walking into Chang'an in the early eighth century might pass a Sogdian merchant from Central Asia, a Japanese student-monk, a Turkic guardsman, and a Persian wine-seller before reaching the market. The city held temples for Buddhists and for religions that had come from Iran and the eastern Mediterranean. Wealthy young men played polo, a game from Iran and Central Asia, and court orchestras played tunes from Kucha and India. The Tang capital was one of the most connected cities on earth.

Yet the same city was built to control movement. Its residents lived in walled wards whose gates closed at night. Trade was confined to two supervised markets. And at the top of society, a small number of famous families held a large share of the highest offices, generation after generation. The central problem of the lecture is therefore not whether Chang'an was cosmopolitan. It clearly was, in the sense that it was shaped by people and practices from many regions. The question is what that openness did and did not change. The lecture's answer is that cultural exchange and social hierarchy existed at the same time, and that the old elite adapted rather than disappeared.

Scholars have studied both halves of this picture. Victor Cunrui Xiong's history of Sui–Tang Chang'an reconstructed the city's plan and daily regulation. Edward H. Schafer's classic study of "T'ang exotics" traced the goods, animals, music, and people that flowed into the empire. Valerie Hansen's work on the Silk Road stresses that much of that exchange was local and small-scale rather than a single great highway. On the elite, David Johnson and Patricia Ebrey showed how great clans survived dynastic change, and Nicolas Tackett's study of tomb inscriptions argues that a capital-based elite kept its power until the violence of the late ninth century. Put together, this work lets the lecture hold openness and exclusion in the same frame.

I. A Planned Capital Built to Be Watched

The Grid

Chang'an was a Sui creation. Wendi built it in the 580s as Daxing, near the site of the old Han capital, and the Tang kept it as its main capital. The walled city measured nearly six miles east to west and more than five miles north to south. The palace city and the imperial city, where government offices stood, sat against the northern wall. A broad central avenue ran south from them, and a grid of streets divided the rest of the city into about 108 walled residential wards (sources and modern reconstructions differ slightly on the exact number). Two government-supervised markets, the East Market and the West Market, each occupied the space of two wards, and land was also set aside for temples.

The plan expressed imperial order. The emperor faced south over his city, as Chinese political tradition expected a ruler to do, and the straight lines of the grid made authority visible. Luoyang served as a secondary capital; Empress Wu, the subject of Lecture 4, spent much of her reign there. Together with their suburbs, the two cities were among the largest in the world. The textbook gives more than two million people for Chang'an and its suburbs. Modern estimates vary widely, because no surviving Tang record gives a reliable head count for the city, so the figure should be presented as an estimate of scale, not a census.

Walls Inside the Walls

Each ward had its own walls and gates, which opened in the morning and closed at night to the sound of drums; after curfew, patrols kept people off the main streets. Residents were registered by ward. The markets opened at midday and closed before dusk, under officials who inspected weights and set prices. Charles Benn's account of Tang daily life describes a city where the state tried to know who lived where and when people moved. These controls loosened over time, especially after the An Lushan rebellion, but in the early Tang they were real.

The regulated city helps explain its openness. Foreign merchants, envoys, and monks could live and trade in Chang'an because the state had places to put them, rules to govern them, and officials to watch them. Openness and control were not opposites. They were parts of the same design.

Analytical Significance

II. Roads, Routes, and the People Who Traveled Them

An Empire of Post Stations

The Tang state maintained a network of official post stations along its main roads and waterways. The Six Codes of the Tang (Tang liudian), an eighth-century administrative handbook, counts 1,639 of them: 1,297 on land, 260 on water, and 86 serving both, ideally spaced about thirty Tang li (roughly ten miles) apart. Couriers, officials, and envoys used them to carry documents and travel across the empire. This infrastructure did not exist for tourists or merchants, but it made the whole empire more connected, and it pointed toward the capital.

Expansion and the Silk Road

Early Tang expansion into Central Asia, discussed in Lecture 2, brought the oasis cities of the Tarim Basin and routes beyond them under Tang overlordship. The Tang also regained territory in northern Vietnam once held by the Han, though it did not keep Korea. Military reach helped secure corridors and drew new communities into imperial space. But the flow of people and goods was not created by the Tang state alone. Hansen's work stresses that the "Silk Road" was a web of shorter routes and local exchanges, and that much long-distance trade moved in stages through many hands. Merchants, pilgrims, and envoys used Tang roads, but they also used networks that predated the dynasty and outlasted its control.

Who Came?

Chang'an drew envoys, merchants, pilgrims, and students from Central Asia, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Tibet, and farther away. Sogdians, Iranian-speaking merchants from the region around Samarkand and Bukhara, were especially important in overland trade. Japanese embassies brought monks and students who carried Tang law, Buddhism, and city planning back home. Turkic families settled in the capital after 630, and Turkic soldiers served in Tang armies. Britannica notes that the court received embassies from Sasanian Persia and the Byzantine Empire. Chang'an's cosmopolitan life depended on connections beyond its walls.

Analytical Significance

III. Religion, Fashion, and Music: Exchange and Its Limits

A Diverse Religious Landscape

Foreign merchants and residents helped make several religions visible in Tang cities. Alongside Buddhism, Chang'an had communities of Nestorian Christians (members of the Church of the East, whose stele erected in the capital in 781 still survives), Manichaeans, and Zoroastrians; Jews and Muslims were also present in Tang cities, especially in the trading ports. The textbook makes an important distinction: these religions were practiced in Tang cities, but they did not spread widely among the Chinese population the way Buddhism had over the previous centuries. Buddhism's deep place in Tang life is the subject of Lecture 4.

Clothing, Polo, and Music

Cultural exchange also changed everyday elite life. Foreign hairstyles and clothing were copied, including Central Asian riding clothes worn by some elite women. Polo became popular among the well-to-do and at court. Instruments and tunes from India, Iran, and Central Asia transformed Chinese music, and court orchestras included ensembles named for foreign lands. Schafer's study shows how much the Tang elite prized imported things: horses, gems, perfumes, textiles, and performers. Exchange moved in both directions. Visitors brought new practices, and Tang residents adopted and adapted them.

Two limits keep this story accurate. First, much of the exchange the sources describe belonged to the wealthy. Polo was a game for people who owned horses and had time to play; exotic goods reached the rich first. Second, openness had conditions. In 779 an edict ordered the Uighurs living in Chang'an (Schafer estimates about a thousand) to wear their own dress and forbade them to marry Chinese women or pass themselves off as Chinese. After the An Lushan rebellion, as Lecture 5 shows, suspicion of foreigners grew.

Analytical Significance

IV. Old Families after the Nine Rank System

What the Sui Took Away

During the centuries of division, a set of great families claimed inherited status and near-automatic access to office through the Nine Rank System, which let local elites rank candidates for government posts. The Sui abolished that system, as Lecture 1 showed, and the court took control of appointments. That weakened the old families' automatic claim to office. It did not make Tang society a meritocracy. The old families kept their wealth, education, marriage networks, and prestige. Some had suffered badly in the sixth-century wars, including the Hou Jing rebellion that devastated the southern capital in 548–552, but their descendants remained influential.

The textbook's summary is striking: men from roughly thirty of the most famous families held an "amazingly large share" of prominent government posts throughout the Tang. The number should be presented as a pattern, not as a fixed list of exactly thirty clans. The point is concentration. A relatively small group of lineages kept supplying chief ministers and high officials for three centuries.

Taizong and the Ranking of Families

The old families' prestige irritated the new ruling house. Some eastern and southern clans, whose members held only middle-ranking posts, ranked themselves above the Tang imperial family and its northwestern allies, and they preferred to marry among themselves. In 632 Taizong ordered the scholar-official Gao Shilian and others to investigate the leading genealogies and compile a new ranking of clans. The first draft placed Cui Gan (also recorded as Cui Mingan), head of an old Hebei lineage, in the first rank.

Primary Evidence: Taizong on Rank and Office

The emperor's complaint reveals how status actually worked. Ancestry still carried so much weight that high officials of the new dynasty paid to marry into old families and were still turned away. Taizong wanted rank to follow service to the Tang. The compilers obeyed: Cui Gan was moved to the third rank, the imperial house was placed first, and the finished Genealogy of Clans was issued in 638. But the fact that the emperor had to demand a revision shows that the old families' prestige had not disappeared. A second genealogy, compiled in 659 during Empress Wu's ascendancy, again ranked families by official position. Status was a political contest, not a settled inheritance.

Analytical Significance

V. Examinations and the Adaptable Elite

A Wider Door, Not an Open One

Examinations did create a route into government for men from modest backgrounds. But the textbook cautions that a surprising proportion of successful candidates still came from eminent families. Preparation required years of education, books, and teachers, resources that wealthy families could provide. Passing the examination was also not the end of the process. The Board of Personnel judged candidates for appointment by four criteria: deportment and appearance, speech, calligraphy, and the reasoning in written judgments. Those standards were partly subjective, and they favored young men raised in elite households. Recommendation and personal connections also mattered.

The scale was small. The jinshi examination produced only a few dozen graduates in a typical year, and Britannica estimates that even in the late Tang no more than about 10 percent of officials were recruited through the examinations. The examinations mattered most at the top, where they created a highly educated group of officials who owed their advancement at least partly to the dynasty. Empress Wu, as Lecture 4 shows, used this route to bring new men into government.

How the Old Families Changed Their Claims

By the eighth century, the old families increasingly justified their exclusive marriage circles by education, manners, and family morality rather than ancestry alone. Those qualities were largely products of upbringing, so they could preserve social boundaries while sounding less like inherited rank. The Tang elite spent more time in the capitals than earlier elites had, took pride in genealogy, and was highly educated. It did not reject the examinations. Its sons took them, and often passed.

Tackett's study of thousands of tomb inscriptions sharpens this picture. He argues that a "capital elite," concentrated in Chang'an, Luoyang, and the corridor between them and bound together by marriage, dominated high office through most of the Tang and did not gradually fade away. In his account it was the destruction of the capitals during the Huang Chao rebellion of the 880s, not the examinations, that finally broke it. Old status and new recruitment practices had become intertwined, and the combination proved remarkably durable.

Analytical Significance

Closing Synthesis

Chang'an's cosmopolitan life came from a mix of urban planning, official roads, military reach, commercial networks, and migration. People and practices from across Asia shaped the city's religions, clothing, entertainment, and music. At the same time, the city was designed for supervision, its openness had rules, and many of the most visible exchanges belonged to the wealthy. At the top of society, the abolition of the Nine Rank System and the growth of examinations opened a wider door into office, but eminent families kept a large share of high posts by defending their prestige, adapting their claims, and sending their sons through the new examinations.

The central historiographical shift is from a celebratory image of an "open" Tang toward a more precise account of who took part in openness and on what terms. Schafer and Xiong recovered the richness of the city's exchanges and the tight order that framed them; Hansen reminded historians that the Silk Road was a web of local exchanges; Johnson and Ebrey explained the survival of great clans; and Tackett argued that a marriage-linked capital elite dominated office until the late ninth century. This scholarship does not diminish Tang cosmopolitanism. It locates it.

For the lecture, the most important distinction is between cultural openness and social openness. The city was open to exchange; membership in the elite remained carefully guarded. The question to leave with students is which kind of openness mattered more to ordinary people in the Tang empire, and whether a society can be deeply connected to the wider world while remaining closed at the top.

Suggested Reading for Deeper Preparation

Victor Cunrui Xiong, Sui-Tang Chang'an: A Study in the Urban History of Medieval China (2000). The standard English reconstruction of the city's plan, wards, markets, and regulation. Essential for the first half of the lecture.

Edward H. Schafer, The Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A Study of T'ang Exotics (1963). A classic, vividly written survey of imported goods, animals, music, and people, and of the Tang elite's taste for the foreign. Also the source for the 779 edict on Uighur residents.

Valerie Hansen, The Silk Road: A New History (2012). Argues from excavated documents that Silk Road trade was mostly local and small-scale, carried in stages. A useful corrective to the image of a single great highway.

Charles Benn, Daily Life in Traditional China: The Tang Dynasty (2002). Accessible chapters on the city, markets, clothing, entertainment, and religion. Good for concrete examples of curfew, polo, and dress.

Nicolas Tackett, The Destruction of the Medieval Chinese Aristocracy (2014). Uses thousands of tomb inscriptions to reconstruct a marriage-linked capital elite and argues that it survived until the violence of the 880s. The most important recent work on the Tang elite.

David G. Johnson, The Medieval Chinese Oligarchy (1977), and Patricia Buckley Ebrey, The Aristocratic Families of Early Imperial China: A Case Study of the Po-ling Ts'ui Family (1978). Two foundational studies of how great clans kept their status across dynasties. Ebrey's case study of the Cui family connects directly to Taizong's quarrel with Cui Gan.

Mark Edward Lewis, China's Cosmopolitan Empire: The Tang Dynasty (2009). Chapters on cities, the rural and urban economy, and foreign relations tie together the lecture's themes of connection and hierarchy.