Cities of Aristocrats and Bureaucrats: The Development of Medieval Chinese Cityscapes (New Edition)

Heng Chye Kiang

The emergence of the open city during the 11th century is one of the most dramatic and important changes in Chinese urban history. While the Sui and the early Tang city was controlled and highly disciplined, with limited commercial activity, the late Northern Song city, filled with pluralistic streets active around the clock, became a new urban paradigm. These cities reflect the societies that gave rise to them - the one rooted in a strong aristocratic power with a highly hierarchical social structure, and the other shaped by a pluralistic, mercantile society managed by pragmatic professional bureaucrats.

Cities of Aristocrats and Bureaucrats provides an in-depth account of the process of transformation from the city under curfew of the Tang period to the open city of the Song. It analyses the multidimensional factors that gradually led to the development of an urban culture, which in turn helped cement the trend towards the open city with its irregular layout and distinct urban tissue and silhouette.

"... brings new techniques to the study of places in time that will enrich our conceptions of urban history"
-Journal of Asian Studies

"This is an important work for providing background to so much Chinese history and literature in general, and architecture in particular."
-William Dolby, Department of East Asian Studies, University of Edinburgh

"I have thoroughly enjoyed reading 'The Development of Medieval Chinese Citiscapes' ... As far as I know, nothing like it exists in any language ... It stands as an original contribution to the small body of literature on Chinese urban planning and the transformation from Tang to Song society."
-Nancy Steinhardt, Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Pennsylvania

"The most impressive part of this study is his examination of the two-dimensional urban grid plan and its demise over time. In this approach, Heng follows a second important methodology represented in The City of Late Imperial China - that of historian Arthur Wright, who analyzed the cosmology of the Chinese city using Han-dynasty Chang'an as his principal example (33-73), and that the geographer Sen-dou Chang, who described the morphology of provincial capitals (75-100). Heng carries this approach further to examine the late Tang- and Song-dynasty cities and to explore what happened to the strictly enforced grid plan over time as it broke down in the Song period and gave way to another model: the open city."
-Linda Cooke Johnson, Journal of Asian Studies

HENG Chye Kiang is Professor at the Department of Architecture and Dean of the School of Design and Environment at the National University of Singapore.

publication year: 2012
272 pages
ISBN: 978-9971-69-529-3  Paperback  US$30.00  S$38.00