The Imperial Capitals of China

April 14, 2008
China’s cities, notes Cotterell (China: A Cultural History
), played an important role in symbolizing the legitimacy of a new regime; upstart emperors spent untold treasure and lives on building magnificent capitals, carefully laid out on principles of cosmology and feng shui, to demonstrate their assumption of the Mandate of Heaven. These cities furnish the author with splendid panoramas of 2,300 years of Chinese civilization. Working with maps, photos, reproductions of Chinese art and literary accounts, he recreates the cosmopolitanism of medieval Chang’an, the commercial bustle of Song dynasty Hangzhou and the sublime architecture of Beijing’s Forbidden City. These set pieces frame a sprightly history of China up to the founding of the republic. Cotterell elucidates large-scale themes—the long seesaw battle between China and its nomadic neighbors, the Confucian scholar-bureaucracy’s struggle to control the state, and the cycle of imperial despotism and peasant revolt—while sketching a picaresque chronicle of dynastic succession and court intrigue, complete with overmighty eunuchs and scheming concubines. The result is a fine evocation of China as both a place and a story. 46 b&w photos and maps.

April 1, 2008
Cotterell intertwines the successions of the Chinese empires ruling houses with descriptions of where they set up for business. Nearly a dozen capitals have existed since Qin Shi unified China in 221 BCE, and Cotterell carries the stories of their design, construction, and fates up to the final and best preserved imperial seat, the Forbidden City in Beijing. More than an administrative center, an imperial capital reflected Chinese ideas of cosmic order and was arranged accordingly. Cotterell explains historically misty antecedents of the typical layouta rectangle oriented north and south, with the palace in the centerthen proceeds to the individual circumstances of each capital. Cosmic expressions they may have been, but Chinese capitals were sited and built with defense in mind and moved whenever a dynasty lost the mandate of heaven. Cotterell relates the falls from the Han to the Tang to the Qing with an emphasis on palace intrigues as chronicles recorded them. In addition to the political history, Sinophiles should savor Cotterells surveys of the imperial capitals.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)