Map of Xingqing Palace
In this ink rubbing, which is based on an engraved stone stele from 1080, the palace is shown from above, displaying the six outer gates of the palace as well as the seven sections of various sizes within the internal walls. The southern half of the palatial complex were occupied by the Dragon Pond and its grounds. A stream or irrigation ditch crossed the palace from east to west, north of the pond, with a tributary connecting it to the pond. The stele shows eight freestanding buildings within the walls as well as a hall built into the southwest corner of the outer wall. The largest buildings in the palace compound were two halls enclosed by courtyards in the palace’s northwest quarter. Three smaller buildings which might have been open pavilions occupied the grounds of Dragon Pond. Another large hall was just south of the palace’s northern gate, and the northeast quarter was made up of open grounds and two smaller structures. The gates, pond, and buildings were all labeled on the stele.
The stone stele of 1080 was discovered in a fragmentary state in 1934. It purportedly contained the plan of the entire city of Chang’an. This ink rubbing measures approximately 76 cm by 102 cm (30 inches by 40 inches). It was made from a proto-printing technique in which the maker laid a wet piece of paper on the stone, carefully pressing the paper into the depressions of the engraving so as not to break the paper. By letting the paper dry a bit, this allowed the maker to deboss the paper with use of the stone. Next, when the paper was partially dried, the maker would lightly tap the paper with an ink pad, light enough to not darken the debossed sections. When the paper was fully covered with ink, the majority of it would be black while the debossed sections remaining in white lines delineating the map’s images and texts.
To understand the meaning Xingqing Palace had both in its heyday and to later dynasties, it is important to place it in its context of the Tang capital of Chang’an. Although an earlier city near the same site had been one of the capitals of the Han dynasty, Chang’an was reconstructed by the first Sui emperor, Wendi, and further reconstructed under the Tang dynasty. Chang’an was the eastern terminus of the Silk Roads and because of this was home to several ethnic and religious populations. More than one hundred Buddhist monasteries were built in Chang’an along with Daoist, Christian, and Zoroastrian places of worship. The city was constructed near symmetrically in a grid pattern with twenty-five roads running longitudinally, and fourteen roads running latitudinally making it incredibly large. The two main, wide roads running north and south, and east and west of the city were divided into three lanes, with the middle lane exclusively for the imperial family. The city was divided into 110 wards: 108 residential wards and 2 wards that housed markets. The multiple gates leading in and out of the outer wall, and inside and outside of the imperial and palace city walls were reserved for different groups -- whether that be commoners, officials, or the imperial family. From a functional purpose this helped with population control, and government control of commerce in the markets with imperial sanctioned purchasing, selling, and price fixing. Gardens and ponds helped with the distribution of water. From a symbolic perspective, this delineation of specific gates, roads, and wards for specific groups helped inculcate the population into government sanctioned social hierarchies -- this is also seen in the Forbidden City. This helped create the association between city planning and its “associations with strong Chinese-style leadership” [2].
In comparison to other depictions of cities and buildings along the Silk Roads, the map of Xingqing Palace is distinct in both its perspective and the experience it conveys. While they were created hundreds of years after the Xingqing Palace was built, drawings such as Robert Wood’s
illustrations of Palmyra (see Entry No. 9) share some similarities with it. They were all created long after the heydays of the cities they depict and were created from the viewpoint of an outsider looking in. In the case of the Xingqing Palace, these outsiders were artists working for later Chinese dynasties, while Wood was among the Europeans travelling along the Silk Roads. However, while Wood drew from his own perspectives looking up at the monumental ruins of the Silk Road cities, the Xingqing Palace stele was engraved from a perspective looking down on the city. Wood’s illustrations also include indications of scale such as human figures or trees, while the palace stele contains no such indications. While the later depictions of Silk Road cities and ruins emphasize the emotional experience of the locations, the palace stele minimizes it. The Palmyrene illustrations give their locations an otherworldly feeling, almost implying that they could not be matched in the present day of the illustrations. In contrast, the Xingqing Palace stele gives the place a feeling of order and a sense of being ordinary, as far as the palace of the Son of Heaven in the largest city in the world can be ordinary.
The stele depicting Xingqing Palace was carved more than a hundred years after the fall of the Tang dynasty, which raises the question of why later dynasties would want to commemorate the buildings of their predecessors. The stele emphasizes the everyday nature of the palace to make a statement about continuity and improvement between dynasties. The stele indirectly makes the claim that the later dynasties that followed the Tang were capable of matching and exceeding its grand architecture. This bolsters their claim to a continuous Chinese cultural legacy. The European illustrations of Silk Road cities make a claim in the opposite direction. They show the ruined cities as unmatched by following states along the Silk Road, strengthening the European claim to cultural greatness.
The style followed by the stele of displaying the plan of the palace as seen from above is not unique in Chinese cartography. It was often used by later dynasties to display the cities and palaces built by the Sui and Tang [3]. Creating a map of the city from above is akin to creating the city in miniature, and owning a city map is akin to owning the city. This corresponds with the Chinese dynastic habit of displaying the objects of previous dynasties. The image of order that the aerial map creates also serves a political purpose, as legitimizes the current dynasty as the keeper of order in succession to the builders of the city. The true experience of a city like Chang’an may not have matched the order and splendor shown in a display object like the Xingqing palace stele. However, seeing it displayed connected the splendor of the past with the present. The dynasty creating the image declared both that it strove toward the splendor of the great cities of the past and that it could create that splendor. In this way the images served as proxies for architectural drawings of future cities that the authority creating the images hoped to create.
-Ryan Rossio and Omar Kofie
[1] Fu Xinian, Chinese Architecture (Yale University Press, 2016), 104-105.
[2] Nancy S. Steinhardt, Chinese Imperial City Planning (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990).
[3] Fu, Chinese Architecture, 99–100.