Tang & Song Dynasty China

In 742 CE, the city of Chang'an held roughly one million people. Constantinople, the largest city in the Christian world at the time, held perhaps half that. Baghdad was still under construction. Paris was a small river town of maybe twenty thousand.

Chang'an was organized on a strict grid — 108 walled wards, each locked at night by its own gates. It had markets for Korean silk, Persian silverwork, and Indian spices. It had Buddhist monasteries, Zoroastrian temples, a Nestorian Christian church, and a mosque. Foreign merchants, diplomats, and scholars came and stayed. A Japanese monk named Ennin spent nine years in Tang China and wrote a travel diary; it remains one of the most detailed accounts of medieval urban life anywhere in the world.

The The Chinese imperial dynasty that ruled from 618 to 907 CE, founded by the Li family after the collapse of the Sui dynasty. The Tang era is considered a high point of Chinese civilization, marked by territorial expansion, cosmopolitan culture, flourishing arts and poetry, and robust trade along the Silk Roads. was the political structure that made Chang'an possible. Founded in 618 CE by the Li family after the brief, brutal Sui dynasty burned itself out building the Grand Canal and the Great Wall, the Tang lasted nearly three centuries. At its height, Tang territory stretched from Manchuria in the northeast to the borders of Persia in the west, making it one of the largest empires of its era.