Luoyang on the Silk Road and the Grand Canal

Luoyang sat on two of the great routes of the pre-modern world. One ran by land, one by water, and they met in the same city.

A City at the Centre of Two Routes

Luoyang holds three World Heritage listings, covering six sites in all. Two of those listings were granted on the same day, 22 June 2014, and together they describe the two directions in which the city was connected to everywhere else.

A third listing, the Longmen Grottoes, is a cliff of carved stone five kilometres south of the city, and it is not the subject of this article. The two above are the ones that made Luoyang a trading city, and they are the reason this article exists on a site about things that are made here.

The Grand Canal Ran Through Luoyang

The Grand Canal was built to move grain. The Sui dynasty assembled it in the early seventh century, linking the Yangtze delta and the northern plains into a single water route — and it did not run between those two regions directly. It ran through Luoyang.

The canal as a whole stretched about 2,700 kilometres, built in four sections with Luoyang at the centre. That figure is the length of the entire system, not of any one part of it. The distinction is worth keeping, because it explains the scale of what the Sui and Tang courts were doing: they were not improving a local waterway, they were wiring the empire's food supply to a single inland point.

Two of the Luoyang sites on the World Heritage list are granaries: Hanjia Granary and Huiluo Granary. A capital of Luoyang's size — more than a million people at its Han-era peak — could not feed itself from the fields around it. Grain came in by canal, in bulk, and was held in store on a scale that has left archaeological traces a modern city has to build around.

The Silk Road's Eastern End

The other route ran overland. In 2014, UNESCO inscribed the Silk Roads: the Routes Network of Chang'an–Tianshan Corridor, a listing that runs from the Tang capital at Chang'an westward across Central Asia. Luoyang is on it, at the eastern end, with three sites.

They read almost like a sentence: the Han-Wei Luoyang city site, Dingding Gate, and Hangu Pass. A city, a gate, and a pass — the place where goods were gathered, the point where they came in, and the checkpoint they cleared on the way from the west.

A Gate in Use for 530 Years

Of the three, Dingding Gate is the easiest to grasp. It stayed in use for 530 years.

That is the same 530 years the Sui-Tang city itself lasted, because the gate was one of its entrances — standing through the whole working life of the capital the Sui built in 605 and the Tang inherited. A gate in use for five centuries is not a monument that was left standing by accident; it was kept in service, and the traffic that passed through it — envoys, merchants, cart teams, tribute — is what a Silk Road listing is actually recording.

The name is worth a note as well. Ding ding is the classical phrase for establishing a capital, the act of fixing a new dynasty's seat of power. The gate's name is a statement about the city behind it.

Eastern Capital, Then Divine Capital

Luoyang's Tang-era standing can be read off a short sequence of dates.

The last line is the one that carries the weight. For a period in the late seventh century the empire was governed from Luoyang by a woman who had taken the throne in her own right — and the city she ruled from was no longer the secondary capital it had been under the Sui. It had been renamed, and the name said what it was: not a satellite, but the seat.

What Travelled Along These Roads

Routes carry goods, and two of the goods that came along these ones left permanent marks on what Luoyang makes.

The first is cobalt. Tang potters fired a low-temperature lead glaze coloured by metal oxides: copper for green, iron for yellow-brown, and cobalt for blue. China had no low-manganese cobalt ore of its own at the time, and refining methods were not yet good enough to make do with what it had. The cobalt came in over the Silk Road from Persia, and blue-glazed work was reserved for the court and the aristocracy. A blue splash on a Tang three-colour piece is a record of a trade route.

The second is the camel. Camels appear in Tang tomb figures constantly, usually with a groom — often a foreign one — leading them, and they were the working animal of the overland route: the "ship of the desert," in the phrase that stuck. A Tang camel figure is not a decorative exotic. It is a portrait of the vehicle that made the eastern end of the Silk Road function.

Two Routes, One Warehouse

Put the two routes together and Luoyang's role becomes simple to state. Grain came in by water from the south and east; goods came in by land from the west; both were stored, sorted and taxed here before moving on. The city was, in the most literal sense, a warehouse with a court attached.

That is the setting in which Luoyang's crafts grew up, and it is why the objects on this site look the way they do. A three-colour glaze that needed imported cobalt, a camel figure that recorded the animal that carried the trade — these are not folk decorations that happen to come from an old city. They are products of a place that sat at the junction of the two routes that supplied it.

You can see how the camel figures are made on our Tang dynasty camel page, and how cobalt blue is fired in three-colour glazes on our Tang sancai page.