The Tang dynasty
Chang'an becomes the largest and most cosmopolitan city on Earth.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 289 years
- Known to
- ± 10 years
- Era
- Post-Classical, Holocene
The Tang rule from 618, running an examination-recruited bureaucracy, an equal-field land system and a capital of perhaps a million people laid out on a grid, with resident Sogdian, Persian, Japanese, Korean and Indian communities and Nestorian, Zoroastrian and Manichaean places of worship. It is the classical age of Chinese poetry — Li Bai, Du Fu, Wang Wei — and Chinese models of writing, law and administration are adopted wholesale by Japan and Korea.