Five Capitals on One River

Most historic cities have one old quarter. Luoyang has five capitals.

They were not built side by side and abandoned together. They were built one after another across some two thousand three hundred years, by rulers who kept returning to the same stretch of the Luo River valley — and in several cases the earlier city was still standing when the later one was founded.

Five Cities, One Valley

The Chinese name for this is 五都荟洛 — wu du hui Luo, "five capitals gathered at the Luo." It refers to the five capital-city sites that lie within and around Luoyang's valley today.

Two things make the list unusual. The first is the span: the earliest and the latest are separated by roughly 2,300 years. The second is the distance. These are not five ruins scattered across a province. They sit close enough together that a single day is enough to drive between all of them.

That concentration is the reason this article exists. Luoyang did not have one moment of greatness that it has been living off ever since. It had a long sequence of them, and the work of making things — bronze, ceramic, stone — continued right through the sequence.

Erlitou: The Earliest "China"

Erlitou is the oldest of the five and, to historians, the most consequential. Radiocarbon dating puts it at roughly 1750 to 1520 BCE. The official record identifies it as the capital of the Xia dynasty under the name Zhenxun, and names the kings Tai Kang, Zhong Kang and Di Jie as having ruled from it.

Chinese scholars have described Erlitou as "the earliest China." That phrase is a scholarly characterisation rather than a settled conclusion, and it is worth reading it that way. What is not in dispute is what came out of the ground. The bronze ritual vessels unearthed here are the earliest such group known from China, and among the finds was a dragon ornament inlaid with turquoise.

Yanshi: The Shang Capital

Six kilometres northeast of Erlitou lies Yanshi Shang City. It was laid out around 1600 BCE as the Shang capital Xibo, and it remained in use for more than 200 years.

The distance between the two sites is the detail that stays with people. The dynasty that replaced the Xia built its capital six kilometres from the one it had replaced — and then, more than eight hundred years later, the Zhou built theirs in the same valley again.

The Eastern Zhou Royal City

In 770 BCE the Western Zhou court, driven out of its capital in the west, moved east. King Ping established a new royal seat in the Luoyang valley: the Eastern Zhou Royal City, third of the five. Twenty-five Eastern Zhou kings ruled from Luoyang over more than 500 years.

The site is known today above all for a single excavation. In 2002, archaeologists working in the Eastern Zhou royal city opened a chariot-and-horse pit and found a chariot drawn by six horses — in Chinese, tianzi jia liu, "the Son of Heaven rides six." Classical texts describe six-horse teams as the prerogative of the Zhou king himself. The pit put in the ground what the texts had claimed for two thousand years.

Han-Wei Luoyang: In Use for 1,600 Years

The fourth site is the largest and by far the longest-lived. Han-Wei Luoyang was first laid out in the early Western Zhou and was not finally abandoned until the early Tang — a working life of nearly 1,600 years, of which more than 540 years were spent as an actual capital.

Five dynasties ruled from it: the Eastern Zhou, Eastern Han, Cao Wei, Western Jin and Northern Wei. Under the Northern Wei, the city including its outer enclosure covered around 100 square kilometres. In the Eastern Han, its population reached a peak of about 1.01 million.

A city of a million people does not make things on a small scale. It supported foundries, kilns and carving shops far beyond what a market town could sustain, and it needed the supply chains that fed them. Luoyang's crafts spent most of their history being practised in a city of that scale.

Sui-Tang Luoyang: 51.9 Square Kilometres

In 605 CE Emperor Yang of Sui built a new capital in the valley, and it is the fifth of the five. Sui-Tang Luoyang covered around 51.9 square kilometres in all, and was planned with three market districts and 109 walled wards — commerce and residence separated by design, in the way a capital was supposed to be laid out.

It was in use for more than 530 years.

Most of the work that Luoyang's craftsmen reproduce today is dated to this period. The three-colour glazes, the cast bronze vessels, the figures of horses and camels: when a workshop in the city says it works in a Tang tradition, this is the city and the era it means.

All Five on One List

In 2021, China announced its list of the 100 greatest archaeological discoveries of the past century. All five of Luoyang's capital sites are on it.

That is the strongest form of the claim this article is making. These are not five local ruins with local pride attached to them. They are five separate entries on a national list of one hundred, drawn from the whole country and from the whole century of modern archaeology in China.

Standing Where They Stood

The valley is not an open-air museum, but it is well supplied with them. Luoyang has 112 museums and memorial halls, three of them national first-class institutions, holding more than 600,000 objects between them.

Two are tied directly to the sites above. The Erlitou Site Museum of the Xia Capital opened on 19 October 2019, built beside the excavation it explains. The Luoyang Museum was founded in 1958 and has held national first-class status since 2008; its present building opened in April 2011 and holds nearly 400,000 objects.

None of this is decoration. It is why the objects described on this site are dated the way they are, by period and by technique, with the site names attached. A bronze cast in Luoyang today is not a curiosity from a remote place. It is the current end of a line that runs back through five capitals.

Our about page covers this site's relationship with the city, and our workshop tour page covers how a visit to a working workshop is arranged.