The ideal capital of the Record of Trades, reduced four times in plan: a walled square with three gates a side and nine roads each way, the palace at the centre facing south, the ancestral temple on its left, the altar of soil and grain on its right, the court in front and the market behind, the whole filled with courtyard houses along east–west lanes.
The builder’s chapter of the Kaogong ji describes the capital in a few dozen characters, and Chinese planners returned to them for two thousand years. This town follows them literally, as the commentators read them: a square of nine li with three gates in each side; through every gate an avenue of three carriageways, so that nine roads run each way, each nine chariot-tracks wide, with a ring road of seven tracks inside the wall and roads of five in the country; the palace in the middle, facing south; the ancestral temple on the ruler’s left and the altar of soil and grain on his right; the court in front of the palace and the market behind it, each a hundred paces square. The heights follow the same chapter: the palace gate five zhi, the palace corners seven, the city corners nine.
Distances are reduced about four times (a li of 100 m instead of some 400), but the widths of the roads, the heights of the towers and the sizes of the buildings are true. The halls are built by the rules of the Song Yingzao fashi: odd numbers of bays with the widest at the centre, and roofs graded by rank, from the double hipped roof of the hall of state to the flush gables of the shops. The houses are the courtyard houses of Yuan Dadu and Ming–Qing Beijing, the cities that came closest to the ideal, set in rows between east–west lanes so that every main hall faces south.
Click any building to see which rule placed or shaped it.