Kaogongji (Artificers' Record)
What it is
The Kaogongji, or Artificers' Record, is an ancient Chinese technical text, dated to roughly the 5th century BCE and later incorporated into the Rites of Zhou, that records craft and construction standards. Its section on the ideal capital specifies a square walled city laid out on a nine-by-nine grid of streets, with the ruler's palace at the centre, the ancestral temple and altar of soil flanking it, the court to the front and the market to the rear. The plan expressed a cosmological order linking the ruler, the cardinal directions and the structure of the state. It functioned as a normative ideal rather than a literal building manual.
Why it matters
It codified the Chinese cosmological capital that guided imperial city-building for two millennia. Its prescriptions are legible in great planned capitals such as Tang Chang'an, Yuan Dadu and Ming Beijing, with its axial, walled, palace-centred grid.
Plans it shaped
- Chang’an (Tang Capital) (7th c.)
- Chichén Itzá (c. 600–1200 CE)
- Heian-kyō (Kyoto) (794)
- Dadu (Yuan Beijing) (1267)
- Ming Beijing / Forbidden City (1406–1420)
- Han Chang'an (c. 200 BCE–8 CE)
- Luoyang (Northern Wei Capital) (c. 493–534 CE)
- Linzi (Qi State Capital) (c. 859 BCE)
- Chengdu (Qin Planned City) (c. 311 BCE)
- Guangzhou / Panyu (Nanyue Capital) (204 BCE)
- Fujiwara-kyō (694 CE)
- Karakorum (Mongol Imperial Capital) (1235)