On Sui and Tang Cities: An Introduction

Abstract

ON SUI AND TANG CITIES: INTRODUCTION JACK W CHEN University of California, Los Angeles, USA How are cities in Sui and Tang China to be conceptualized and interpreted? The late medieval Chinese city may belong to the more general history of the city, but there are important differences between cities in China and other cultures, just as there are between medieval and modern cities. Yet, while there have been attempts to theorize the cultural differences among cities across time and space, the ®eld of comparative urbanism has largely remained wedded to the grand narratives of modernity.1 It is the modern city that stands as the teleological determinant of how the medieval city is to be interpreted, and the modern city, as understood by social thinkers such as Ferdinand To Ènnies (1855±1936), Georg Simmel (1858±1918), and Lewis Mumford (1895±1990), evokes themes of agrarian displacement, vertiginous temporality, social anonymity, and ultimately the feeling of alienation.2 Even when the city is examined in its premodern aspect, it is often analyzed with an eye to how it will be transformed by, for example, the advent of industrialization , enforcing the eventual morphology of the city upon its past as if it were destiny.3 A better account of the medieval city, then, should proceed from an understanding of the city as it was experienced by its denizens, and not in terms of its historical teleology. This is not to say that the insights of modern urban theorists cannot be productive, but simply that the entire theoretical edi®ce of modern urbanism cannot be brought unre¯ectively to bear on the medieval city without ®rst exploring a more contextualized and immanent account. The current issue of T'ang Studies takes the perspective of contemporary authors for whom the Sui-Tang city was both the subject and the occasion of writing. It goes without saying that the city has often ®gured as the backdrop for literary works and historical accounts in medieval China, though the human experience of the city Ð its phenomenology Ð has rarely been treated as a scholarly topic in its own right. It is along such lines that one ®nds questions of urban life, social exchange, and, at 1 For recent developments in comparative urbanism, see Andrew C. Isenberg, The Nature of Cities: Culture, Landscape, and Urban Space (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2006); and Jan Nijman, ed., ``Comparative Urbanism,'' special issue, Urban Geography 28.1 (Jan.±Feb., 2007). 2 See To Ènnies, Community and Civil Society, ed. Jose  Harris, trans. Jose  Harris and Margaret Hollis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Simmel, ``The Metropolis and Mental Life,'' in On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 324±39; and Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961). 3 See Gideon Sjoberg, ``The Preindustrial City,'' American Journal of Sociology 60 (1955): 438±45. T'ang Studies, 29. 2±5, 2011 # T'ang Studies Society 2011 DOI: 10.1179/073750311X13142716828866 times, con¯ict, alongside broader issues of how city dwellers represented and experienced their spatial and temporal parameters. The differences between premodern and modern urban experience is perhaps most apparent when examining the Sui-Tang capital, where the Palace City (gongcheng ®Î), the Imperial City (huangcheng ‡Î), and their attendant bureaucratic and ritual structures dominated the space of the city as its cosmopolitical center Ð though not as the city's actual architectural center. The idealization of urban layout in canonical Confucian texts would always be tempered by more practical needs of siting and zoning.4 Also complicating the claims of political space for both capitals and other cities is the role played by Buddhist and Daoist religious sites, which acted as different kinds of ordering centers in the shared urban space. Indeed, the more closely one looks at the medieval cityscape, the more one realizes that the spatial systems of political control claimed through imperial cosmology, in legal codes, and by means of urban design, were continually being negotiated and renegotiated by the actual users of urban space. In fact, it is on this point that the medieval city and the modern city come into both a productive...