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 districts.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-conscious. 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 20th-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 ramshackle 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.