Who ruled Luoyang?

Luoyang lies in western Henan province, China, where the Luo River flows towards the Yellow River on the central plain. Its name refers to its position on the sunny north bank of the Luo. Reckoned the earliest of the Four Great Ancient Capitals of China, it served as a royal or imperial capital under the Eastern Zhou, the Eastern Han, the Wei and Western Jin, the Northern Wei and, alongside Chang'an, the Sui and Tang. Its history is one of repeated splendour and repeated destruction.

The Luoyang basin was one of the earliest centres of Chinese civilisation. At Erlitou, in what is now the city's Yanshi district, archaeologists have found the type site of a Bronze Age culture dated by radiocarbon to roughly 1750 to 1500 BCE, which most regard as China's first state-level society. Chinese archaeologists generally link it with the traditional Xia dynasty, though some Western scholars think the connection unproven without written evidence.

Tradition holds that the Duke of Zhou built a settlement called Chengzhou here in the eleventh century BCE to house the defeated Shang nobility, and moved the dynasty's sacred Nine Tripods there. A second Zhou city, Wangcheng, was built about 15 kilometres to the west, and the modern city stands over its ruins. In 771 BCE the Eastern Zhou made Wangcheng their capital, and in 510 BCE the court moved to Chengzhou. The founder of the Han, Liu Bang, is said to have considered Luoyang as his capital before choosing Chang'an.

In 25 CE Emperor Guangwu made Luoyang the capital of the Eastern Han dynasty. The walled city held two great palaces linked by a covered way, an imperial university and an observatory, and in 166 a party claiming to come from the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius arrived there. According to tradition, the White Horse Temple, founded just outside the walls in 68 CE, was China's first Buddhist temple. The Han collapse brought ruin: the capital burned in 189, and in 190 the warlord Dong Zhuo had it sacked and razed as he withdrew to Chang'an.

Cao Pi, the first Wei emperor, rebuilt it as his capital in 220, and the succeeding Jin dynasty ruled from it too; at its Jin height it may have had some 600,000 people. In 311 Xiongnu-led forces of the Han-Zhao state sacked and burned the city in the Disaster of Yongjia, and for nearly two centuries northern and southern regimes fought over the ruins.

In 493 Emperor Xiaowen of the Northern Wei, as part of his policy of adopting Chinese culture, moved his capital from Datong to Luoyang and settled more than 150,000 people there. The Wei began carving the Longmen Grottoes, whose cliff chapels hold tens of thousands of Buddhist statues, and built the great pagoda of Yongning Temple. In 534 the warlord Gao Huan captured the city and forced its people to move to Ye.

Emperor Yang of the Sui dynasty founded a new Luoyang on a planned layout in 604. Under the Tang it was the Eastern Capital, second only to Chang'an, with perhaps a million inhabitants. Wu Zetian, the only woman to rule China as emperor in her own name, made it the capital of her Zhou dynasty, renamed it Shendu, the divine capital, and built an enormous palace there. The city was damaged in the An Lushan rebellion of the mid-eighth century. Tang epitaphs found there record a mixed community that included Sogdian and Chinese Christian families.

Under the Northern Song, Luoyang was the Western Capital, the birthplace of the dynasty's founder Zhao Kuangyin, and a cultural centre where several philosophers lived. For centuries it was known officially as Henanfu, recovering the name Luoyang only in 1912.

Today it is a prefecture-level city of China with about seven million people in its municipality, known for its annual peony festival. UNESCO has listed the Longmen Grottoes as a World Heritage Site since 2000, and in 2014 sites of the Han, Wei and Sui-Tang cities and two granaries of the Grand Canal were added to the Silk Roads and Grand Canal inscriptions. The Luoyang Museum displays finds reaching back to the Xia, Shang and Zhou periods.