A capital of the Celestial Empire
It has a million inhabitants. Its streets are laid out in a geometrically strict grid pattern. The commercial and shopping are carefully zoned away from the residential districts. The shops crammed with all kids of imported and luxury goods, the restaurants are exotically varied a gourmet’s paradise and the women are highly fashion conscious. It is an affluent society, with problems of juvenile delinquency.
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 ramshackle dwellings huddled around them and when even Rome once the sovereign city of the wastern 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