China's earliest great capital still watches the Luo
Luoyang sits where the Luo meets the Yellow River in western Henan, among China’s oldest cities and the earliest of the Four Great Ancient Capitals. Its name means the sunny north bank of the Luo. By the end of 2022 the municipality held about 7.08 million permanent residents.
In 1036 BCE the Duke of Zhou built Chengzhou for captured Shang elites and shifted the Nine Tripod Cauldrons from Haojing; Wangcheng rose fifteen kilometres west and became Eastern Zhou’s capital in 771 BCE. Emperor Guangwu declared Luoyang Eastern Han capital on 27 November AD 25, walling a four-by-two-and-a-half-kilometre rectangle. A Roman mission from Marcus Aurelius’s realm reached the city in 166 after landing in Rinan. Dong Zhuo sacked it in 190; Cao Pi restored capital status for Wei in 220. At Jin’s height some 600,000 people lived there—likely second only to Rome.
Northern Wei Emperor Xiaowen moved his court from Datong in 493, relocating over 150,000 people by 495 and opening the Longmen Grottoes—more than 30,000 Buddhist statues of that era survive in the cliff chapels—while founding Shaolin on nearby Mount Song. Tang Luoyang as Dongdu held around a million, second to Chang’an; Empress Wu renamed it Shendu. Song emperors called it Xijing; Zhao Kuangyin, Song’s founder, was born there. UNESCO now lists Longmen (2000) plus Grand Canal barns and Silk Road city sites (2014).
Modern administration spans seven districts and seven counties after a 2021 reorganisation that folded Yanshi and Mengjin into the urban core. Mountains cover about forty-six percent of the municipal area, hills forty-one, plains fourteen. Extremes since 1951 run from −18.2 °C to 44.2 °C under a dry-winter humid subtropical climate. The Luoyang Museum, opened 1958, shows seventeen hundred exhibits from Xia through Zhou, while Guo Shoujing’s 1276 Dengfeng observatory still stands eighty kilometres southeast.
Source: Luoyang
