To the south of Xi'an, the largest city in the northwest, there is a Chang'an District, a district of the same name as The Chang'an District under Shijiazhuang's jurisdiction, which was established from Chang'an County before 2002. Although there are fenghao ruins in this chang'an county as far back as the Zhou Dynasty and the Afang Palace ruins in the Qin Dynasty, and there are recent ancestral courts of the four major sects of Buddhism, such as the Huayan Sect and the Vinaya, in people's cognition, the name Chang'an only belongs to the ancient capital of the thirteen dynasties that was once the capital of the Great Han And Sheng Tang Dynasties.
If chang'an is to be labeled, then almost any one of them is incomparably dazzling: the ancient capital of one of the four major cities in the world, the double champion with the most and the longest time in the Jiandu Dynasty in the ancient capital of China, the crown of the Sui and Tang dynasties that has long occupied the world's largest city, the eastern starting point of the Silk Road, the natural history museum, the world historical city, the famous historical and cultural city of China, the history of the founding of the city for more than 3,000 years, the history of the construction of the capital for more than 1,000 years...
However, this city that killed any "ancient capital" in China has actually fallen for thousands of years, and the only faint return to the light in five hundred years is more than a year in xijing, which was dashun in the peasant uprising at the end of the Ming Dynasty, and this year has passed nearly three hundred years since it was renamed Xi'an - in the second year of Ming Hongwu, Xu Da entered Shaanxi and changed Fengyuan Road to Xi'an Province, which was the beginning of Xi'an's name. The predecessor of Fengyuan Road was Jingzhao Province, and Jingzhao Province was a synonym for Chang'an City as the capital city of Gyeonggi.
More than twenty years after the Ming Dynasty renamed Chang'an to Xi'an, Zhu Biao, the eldest son of Zhu Yuanzhang, toured Shaanxi in the west and proposed that the capital of the Ming Dynasty be moved from Nanjing to Xi'an. However, with the death of Zhu Biao, this matter was never mentioned again, and after the Battle of Jingnan, the capital of the Ming Dynasty moved north to Yanjing, and Xi'an once again lost the opportunity to return to the light. Since then, every time there has been a change of regime, there will be voices for Xi'an, but the glory of the Han and Tang Dynasties that has been placed on the city is completely gone.
In fact, the earliest to take Xi'an as the capital was not the Qin Han and Sui and Tang Dynasties, Hojing as the capital of the Western Zhou For 275 years, the ruins of Fenghao are in the chang'an district of the current Xi'an; the Eastern Zhou capital moved through the Spring and Autumn Warring States, to the Qin ding capital Xianyang, the imperial center returned to Xi'an again; Liu Bang took the meaning of "changzhi long-term peace" after the founding of the Han Dynasty, with Chang'an as the capital name, which continued for the Western Han Dynasty for 210 years; the Eastern Han Dynasty and the subsequent division of the Three Kingdoms and the Two Jin Dynasties, Chang'an's state capital fell by the wayside for most of the time, until the Sui Dynasty unified the country.
However, Xi'an, as the capital of the Sui Dynasty, was not called Chang'an, but the little-known Daxing, and at the same time, this capital was also divided into most of the scenery by the eastern capital Luoyang during the Sui Dynasty. In the Tang Dynasty, which inherited the great unification of the Sui Dynasty, there were also two capitals, east and west, but Chang'an's status as an orthodox capital was long consolidated, and the area of Chang'an City reached an unprecedented area of nearly 100 square kilometers. Chang'an served as the center of the Tang Empire for 286 years, but the city also declined with the fall of the Tang Dynasty.
Why did Xi'an's highlight moment come to an abrupt end after the Tang Dynasty? The first direct cause is that the successive years of war at the end of the Tang Dynasty destroyed the prosperity of the city, which is no different from the Han Chang'an City at the end of the Western Han Dynasty, when Chang'an was described as ten rooms and nine empty. The migration of the capitals from the Three Kingdoms to the Southern and Northern Dynasties and the Tang Dynasty, in addition to the various expedient considerations of warlords and ethnic minority regimes, is also related to the evolution of Chinese history that has made the vision of those who are competing for the deer broader.
On the one hand, the core area of civilization has a tendency to return from Guanzhong to the Central Plains (the Sui and Tang dynasties with Luoyang as the east are all temptations for this kind of return), on the other hand, the period of division of small countries has also given the sub-optimal zone on the edge of Chinese civilization the opportunity to be the capital of a country. But the main reason is related to the change in the natural endowments of the Guanzhong region where Chang'an is located. It can be said that as the ancient capital of Xi'an Chengye Guanzhong, defeat is also Guanzhong, this "defeat" refers to decay.
Guanzhong was named because it was located within the four passes between the Northern Shaanxi Plateau and the Qinling Mountains, and many dynasties chose this to establish the country, not only because it was an excellent position for easy to defend and difficult to attack, but also because of the fertile soil on the Guanzhong Plain "Eight Hundred Mile Qin River". Zhang Liang, who assisted Liu Bang in achieving hegemony, won the title of "The Kingdom of Heavenly Palace" with the sentence "Guanzhong Left Kunhan, Right Longshu, Woye Qianli, this so-called Golden City Thousand Miles, The Kingdom of Tianfu".
Guanzhong's rich land and irrigation system based on Weishui first allowed the world-class capital to accommodate more people without worrying about eating and drinking. However, when the Bashui of Runchang'an was not burdened by climate change and urban population growth, the laurels of the "Kingdom of Tianfu" were abandoned in Guanzhong and fell on the head of the Chengdu Plain, and Tang Xuanzong, who fled to Shu during the Anshi Rebellion, seemed to witness the ceremony of the transposition of the two places through the bridge section of "Ming Emperor Xingshu".
In the years following the decline of Guanzhong, the Central Plains Dynasty gradually lost control of the Western Regions and the eastern edge of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, and the Silk Road connecting the East and the West was further blocked after the rise of the Ottoman Empire. With the prosperity of the Jianghuai economy and the rise of maritime trade, the Northern Dynasty began to support the North with material resources in the southeast. The Sui Dynasty Emperor excavated the Grand Canal connecting Luoyang and Jiangnan, the Northern Song Dynasty chose Kaifeng on the Yellow River as the capital, the Yuan Dynasty led the Grand Canal north to Beijing and Tianjin, and the Ming and Qing dynasties deepened their dependence on the Grand Canal, all reflecting this reality.
Relying only on land in Guanzhong, one cannot trade with Europe to the west and the Middle East, the other cannot improve the efficiency of communication with the east, and its own wealth is difficult to maintain, so it is not surprising that it will become an outcast after decay.
#西安 #