Chang'an

'''Chang'an''' is a former name of the city Xi'an in Shaanxi Province, China, used when it served as the capital city of several Chinese dynasties from 202 BC to AD907. For much of its time as the capital of the Western Han and Tang, it was the largest city in the world.

The site of Chang'an south of the Wei River in central Xi'an has been inhabited since Neolithic times, when the Yangshao culture had a major center at Banpo to its south during the 5th millennium BC. Fenghao, the twin capitals of the Western Zhou, straddled the Feng River to its southwest from the 11th to 8th centuries BC and the state of Qin and its imperial dynasty had their capital in nearby Xianyang, north of the Wei, in the 4th & 3rd centuries BC. The First Emperor's mausoleum and its Terracotta Army lay to its east.

Liu Bang moved his court to the Changle Palace in 200 BC, soon after the establishment of the Western Han. It held a central position in the large but easily defended Guanzhong Region, near but outside the ruins of the Qin Xianyang and Epang Palaces. Han Chang'an grew up to the north of it and the adjacent Weiyang Palace. Weiyang continued to serve as the imperial palace of the Xin, late Eastern Han, Western Jin, Han-Zhao, Former Qin, Later Qin, Western Wei, Northern Zhou, and early Sui dynasties and became the largest palace ever built, covering nearly seven times larger than the Forbidden Citybefore its destruction under the early Tang. The main areas of Sui and Tang-era Chang'an was south of the earlier settlement and southeast of Weiyang. Around AD750, Chang'an was called a "million-man city" in Chinese records; most modern estimates put the population within the walls of the Tang city around 800,000 - 1,000,000. The 742 census recorded in the ''New Book of Tang'' listed the population of Jingzhao, the province including the capital and its metropolitan area, as 1,960,188 people in 362,921 households and modern scholarsincluding Charles Benn and Patricia Ebreyhave concurred that Chang'an and its immediate hinterland could have supported around 2,000,000 people.

Amid the Fall of Tang, the warlord Zhu Wen forcibly relocated most of the city's remaining population to Luoyang in 904. Chang'an was of minor importance in the following centuries but again became a regional center under the Northern Song. Its name was changed repeatedly under the Mongol Yuan dynasty before the Ming settled on Xi'an and erected its city walls around the former Sui and Tang palace district, an area about an eighth the size of the medieval city at its height. Provided by Wikipedia