Set the state temple at the exact centre of the city, where the avenues from the gates cross, and the king’s palace to its north.
A square wall, a moat and five gates
Enclose the capital in a square wall with a moat outside it; open five gates, crowned with the four faces of the Buddha, and bring the roads over the moat on causeways lined with giants holding the serpent.
Zhou gives the wall a circuit of about twenty li (Angkor Thom measures three kilometres a side), with a great moat beyond. He counts five gates, two on the east and one on each other side, and on each bridge fifty-four stone figures a side holding a serpent with nine heads.
The figures are gods on one side and demons on the other: the causeway re-enacts the churning of the ocean of milk, in which gods and demons pulled on the serpent Vāsuki to win the elixir of immortality. The wall is the ring of mountains round the world, the moat the ocean.
Related rules
Divide the ground inside the walls by embankments into a regular grid of blocks, each with its ponds and its raised mounds for houses.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “A square wall, a moat and five gates”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/zhou-city-walls. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.