Xin Wen (Princeton University)

In this talk, I examine the history of Chang’an, the capital of the Tang (618–907) dynasty, after its fall. My story begins with the forced evacuation of the imperial court from Chang’an in 904, and ends with the construction of the new Ming-era city and the renaming of the city as “Xi’an” in the late 14th century. Using local gazetteers, travelogues, and later inscriptions on Tang stone monuments in the “Forest of Stele” (beilin) collection that was first assembled in 1087, I trace two major urban transformations of the city: as the new Chang’an downsized to about 1/16 of the Tang city, it also relinquished its erstwhile political role and assumed the new identity as a militarized border town. At the same time, however, visitors and residents continued to recollect and reinscribe Chang’an’s imperial past. By tracing the parallel yet contradictory urban and cultural transformations, this project charts a northern path for the understanding of urban history in Middle Period China.