Writing Memories

A longstanding debate on whether the capital should be located in Chang’an or Luoyang culminated in Ban Gu’s “Western Capital fu” (Xidu fu) and Zhang Heng’s “Western Metropolis fu” (Xijing fu); this debate, and other descriptions of Chang’an preserved in the histories of the early imperial period, led to an image of Chang’an as a city that violates classical ritual. This article reads the Sanfu huangtu (Imperial Plan of the Three Capital Regions) as a response to these debates, as a text of memory that adopts the format of local geographical writings to commemorate Western Han Chang’an. Whereas it is well known that the Plan includes many explicit citations from other texts, this article breaks ground in demonstrating the extent to which its structure and vocabulary are borrowed (without acknowledgment) from the early imperials texts, especially Ban Gu’s and Zhang Heng’s fu.