It has a million inhabitants. Its streets are laid out in a geometrically strict grid pattern. The commercial and shopping areas are carefully zoned' away from the residential district. The shops crammed with all kinds of imported and luxury goods, the restaurants are exotically varied a gourmet's paradise and the women are highly fashion-con- scious. It is an affluent society, with problems of juvenile delinquency. Given this description of a city, and asked to place it geographically and chronologically, many people might be tempted to guess 2h century California; on the evidence it would be a reasonable supposition. In fact this is an accurate description of a city that flourished in China nearly 1400 years ago, at a time when London was the tribal capital of the East Saxons, and little more than a collection of huts: when Paris consisted of a few churches with ram- shackle dwellings huddled around them: and when even Rome, once the sovereign city of the western world, had been reduced by successive barbarian invasions to little more than a provincial shantytown.The city was called Chang'an. It was largely the creation of the first emperor of the Sui dynasty (AD 581-618), Wendi of Sui.