AN ANCIENT CHINESE CAPITAL 

 EARTHWORKS AT OLD CH'ANG-AN * 



By Carl Whiting Bishop 

 Freer Gallery of Art, Washington 



[With four plates] 



Not least in interest among subjects of archeological study is that 

 which has to do with the types of fortification constructed by organized 

 communities in the past. These, once the habit of town-dwelling had 

 become fixed, seem to have tended to fall into two major classes: the 

 arx, acropolis, or citadel, one of whose functions it was to provide 

 a temporary refuge in emergency ; and the enceinte or city-wall proper, 

 designed to afford permanent protection to the group living within it. 

 Sometimes the two forms occur in combination; more often, singly. 



The first type we frequently, though by no means always, find situ- 

 ated on a height; the acropolis of Athens and the Capitoline Hill at 

 Rome are familiar examples. The second class, on the other hand, 

 seems to have developed more especially in those alluvial plains on 

 which sprang up the great river-valley civilizations of the ancient world. 

 To it belong the tremendous earthworks constructed slightly over 

 2,000 years ago about the city of Ch'ang-an (meaning "Long Peace"; 

 possibly Ptolemy's "Sera Metropolis" 2 ), the capital of the then 

 recently established Chinese empire. 



It was in 221 B. C. — the year, it will be recalled, when the Car- 

 thaginian troops in Spain proclaimed Hannibal their commander-in- 

 chief — that at the opposite end of the Old World the great conqueror 

 Ch'in Shih Huang-ti 3 set up, on the ruins of a very ancient and sepa- 

 ratist Chinese feudalism, a centralized and bureaucratic empire which 

 in many details of its organization strikingly recalls the one established 

 some three centuries earlier in western Asia by Darius the Great. 



' The following account contains material included in a report, now in course of preparation, dealing with 

 the investigations conducted in China during the period 1923-1934 by the Freer Gallery of Art, Washing- 

 ton, D. C. Reprinted by permission from Antiquity, vol. 12, No. 45, March 1938. 



J On this identification, see e. g., Grousset, Rene, Histoire de l'Extr6me-Orient, vol. 1, p. 242 and note 5, 

 Paris, 1929. 



3 This name, or rather title, means literally "First Emperor of the Ch'in (Dynasty)"; he is mentioned, in 

 another connection, in Antiquity, vol. 11, p. 27, March 1937. 



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