The Whale Fall: The Death and Rebirth of China’s Eternal Capital

About the Lecture: 

The Chang’an region (modern Xi’an, Shaanxi Province) was the capital of imperial dynasties in China including the Western Zhou (1046–771BCE),  the Qin (221–207BCE), the Western Han (206BCE–9CE), the Sui (581–618), and the Tang (618–907). With close to one million residents and (in the Sui and Tang dynasties) a walled city 1.5 time the size of the island of Manhattan, Chang’an was the largest and most populous city of the ancient and medieval world. Although Chang’an history as China’s eternal capital has been thoroughly explored, little scholarly attention has been paid to its urban transformations after it lost the status as the capital in the early tenth century. This talk, based on my ongoing book project, explores this overlooked era in Chang’an’s history. Using a range of sources including local gazetteers, literary anecdotes, official histories, and stone inscriptions, I argue that Chang’an’s death as imperial capital paradoxically incubated new forms of urban life. This new and smaller urban world was no less dynamic: as emperors and their entourage left the city, farmers, monks, and minor officials encroached on old palaces, took down monumental buildings, and recollected material and immaterial treasures; a more muted skyline among a horizontal sprawl redefined the spatial logic of the city; and a new urban ecosystem centering on the tension between itinerant officials and an ill-defined “people (min)” began to emerge. If we compare the abandoned imperial capital to a carcass of a whale, then the myriad urban life forms that sprung up in post-Tang Chang’an also resemble the more than 400 species that live on a whale after its death and fall. I use the metaphor of the whale fall to point to the exciting new possibilities of looking into the history of Chang’an after the tenth century.

About the Speaker: 

Xin Wen is a historian of medieval China and Inner Asia, and currently an associate professor of pre-modern Chinese history in the Departments East Asian Studies and History at Princeton University. His first book, The King’s Road: Diplomacy and the Remaking of the Silk Road (Princeton University Press, Jan 2023) proposes a new interpretation of the history of the Silk Road as a diplomatic, rather than commercial, network. Currently he is working on a history of the city of Chang’an after the Tang dynasty.