Chang'an City Landscape Study

ChangAn of the Tang Dynasty, the most splendid capital city in scale in the history of China, reflected a great spirit of the great unity of the imperial court. Its city walls and moats undertook a thought of the advantage of location and climate and the harmony of the masses. Its design models after God high up in the heaven and deep down in the nether world. It showed the respect for the emperors, with all the officials attending upon. It took a very important place in the Chinese history of architecture. Starting from the cityscape, the dissertation here made a systematic study of the city of ChangAn of the Tang Dynasty in terms of its key essentials for the cityscape, namely, city wall ,paths,canals, district, and temple towers.The outer city was formed with the enclosing of the edges of ChangAn of the Tang Dynasty, then accordingly, the palace walls, imperial walls and the walls of the one li fang after another. ChangAn of the Tang Dynasty was composed of three palaces, the imperial city and the outer city. The whole city was 18 li and 116 bu long from east to west, 15 li and 170 bu wide from north to south, with a circumsference of 67 li and a height of 1.8 zhang. The imperial city was 5 li and 15 bu long east and west, and 3 li and 140 bu wide from north to south. The palace city was as long as the imperial city and 2 li and 270 bu wide with a height of 3.5 zhang. Da Ming Palace was 4 li 95 bu long and 2 li 148 bu wide. Another city wall was set up around the outside of the palace walls in the east, west and north in the north of Da Ming Palace. Xing Qing Palace was 1,250 meters long from north to south, and 1,075 meters wide east and west, with a double wall in the south. The li fang walls were around 2.5 to 3 meters in depth. The city walls helped to make the city into a whole owing to their great number, strong continuity, their wholeness and impassability. Thereafter, the city walls acquired a role in determining the inner city space from the point of view of vision. So the city walls were of great importance in the formation of a sense of unity of the cityscape. The city gates were important nodes of the city traffic for ins and outs.Path was the most essential factor in cityscape, along which other factors of cityscape spread out in arrangement. It enabled every individual factor inside the city to form an integrity interconnected in space. In the Imperial City there were 7 streets...