Echoes of Chang'an: Youthful Pilgrimage to Xi'an — Epoche C1
The city under the city Modern Xi'an occupies part of the site of Chang'an, the capital of the Tang dynasty from 618 to 907, and the relation between the two is the fact that a visit has to be organised around. Victor Xiong's (2000) urban study of the Sui and Tang capital gives the dimensions: a walled rectangle of roughly $9.7\,\mathrm{km}$ east to west by $8.7\,\mathrm{km}$ north to south, which is about $84\,\mathrm{km}^2$ inside the wall. The walls that visitors now walk in Xi'an are a different structure altogether, raised under the Ming dynasty in the 1370s, and they enclose a rectangle of about $4.2\,\mathrm{km}$ by $2.6\,\mathrm{km}$, or roughly $11\,\mathrm{km}^2$. The Tang city was therefore something like seven times the area of the walled town that stands on part of it, and the wall a traveller climbs to look for Chang'an was built about four and a half centuries after Chang'an ceased to exist. That is not a reason not to go. It is the first thing a visitor going in search of the Tang needs to know, because almost every popular account of the trip gets it wrong, and because the gap between what is sought and what is standing turns out to be the most interesting thing about the journey. Three motives, and a note on the evidence Young Chinese travellers — university students and recent graduates, in the accounts usually given — are said to come to Xi'an for three reasons: the poetry of the Tang and a wish to stand where it was written; a hunger for something authentic after too much time spent among curated online images; and the pleasure of discovery, of finding the small temple rather than the Terracotta Army. An earlier version of this piece supported those three with quoted remarks from named individuals said to have been interviewed. Those interviews cannot be substantiated and the quotations have been removed. What follows treats the three motives as propositions about what the city offers, and tests each against what is documented about Tang Chang'an, about the poems, and about the monuments now standing. All three turn out to be partly right, and each is wrong in a specific and instructive way. What the poets actually wrote about Chang'an Take the first motive. Li Bai (701-762) and Du Fu (712-770) are the two poets invariably named, and the expectation attached to them is of verses celebrating a magnificent cosmopolitan capital. The expectation does not survive contact with the poems, and Stephen Owen's (1996) anthology, which is where most English-language readers meet them, makes the reason plain. Li Bai's connection to the capital was brief. He was summoned to court around 742 and attached to the Hanlin Academy, the emperor's body of literary scholars, for something under three years before leaving under a cloud. The poems from that period are largely occasional court pieces, and his enduring work is set elsewhere — on rivers, in mountains, at parting, at drinking. He is not primarily a poet of Chang'an, and a reader who arrives expecting the city to be his subject has taken a reputation for a bibliography. Du Fu is a poet of Chang'an, and this is where the expectation inverts. He spent about a decade in the capital seeking office with little success, and his major Chang'an poems date from the catastrophe rather than the height. The rebellion led by An Lushan, a frontier general, broke out in 755; the emperor fled, the capital fell, and the fighting continued until 763, after which Chang'an was sacked again by Tibetan forces. Du Fu was trapped in the occupied city in 757, and the poem he wrote there — conventionally rendered in English as "Spring Prospect" — is the single most famous poem about Chang'an in the language. Its opening observation is that the state has been shattered while the mountains and rivers remain, and that the city in spring is deep in unchecked vegetation: the grass growing because there is no one left to cut it. The poem is an elegy over a ruin. This matters for the traveller in a way that goes beyond correcting a misapprehension. The greatest literature associated with this city is not a record of its grandeur but a record of its destruction, written by a man watching it happen. A pilgrimage undertaken to feel the splendour of Chang'an through its poetry is looking for the wrong emotion in the right place. What the poems offer is not access to magnificence but the experience of standing where somebody watched magnificence end — which is, if anything, better suited to a site where almost nothing of the original survives, and which the visitor is in an unusually good position to feel. What "authenticity" can mean here, and what it cannot The second motive is a wish for something real and enduring, and it fixes on three things: the city walls, the Silk Road, and the food streets of the Muslim quarter. Each needs a different answer. The walls are the clearest case and have already been given: they are Ming, not Tang, and their circuit of roughly fourteen kilometres traces a town that would have fitted inside the administrative core of the Tang city with room over. They are genuinely old, genuinely impressive, and among the most complete city walls surviving in China; they are simply not the thing they are being visited as. A traveller who knows this can still walk them profitably, because their alignment marks where the Tang imperial and administrative quarters stood, and walking a Ming wall while holding the Tang plan in mind gives a sense of the true scale that no photograph supplies. The Silk Road claim is sound, and the reality is stranger than the phrase suggests. Edward Schafer (1963) catalogued what actually arrived in Tang China from the west and what the Chinese made of it: not merely silk moving outward but an inward flow of horses, hawks, aromatics, drugs, textiles, dwarfs, dancers and musicians, together with the fashions, religions and anxieties that came with them. Chang'an held resident communities of Sogdians, Persians, Turks, Uigh