The "Record of Trades" (Kaogongji), appended to the Rites of Zhou, prescribes the ideal royal capital (wangcheng) as a walled square measuring nine li on a side, pierced by three gates per side and laid out on nine north-south and nine east-west avenues. The ruler's palace sits at the centre, with the ancestral temple to the left, the altar of soil and grain to the right, the court to the front and the market to the rear. This codified a cosmological diagram in which urban form expressed cosmic and political order. The global context layer already notes the Kaogongji; this entry treats its specifically Chinese transmission and realisation.
It became the canonical template for the Chinese imperial capital, consciously invoked from Han Chang'an through Yuan Dadu to Ming-Qing Beijing.
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