Dynastic History | Tang West Market Site, Xi'an — The Crossroads Under the Floor

Tang Chang'an was a grid of walled wards with two licensed markets, east and west, and buying and selling was legal inside those two enclosures and almost nowhere else. Ward gates and market gates opened and shut on a drum signal; the court did not so much run a city as run a timetable. The 西市 was the foreign end of it — the city terminus of the overland routes, where Sogdian, Persian and other Central Asian merchants traded under a state market office that set the hours and posted the prices.

Those traders left almost no record of their own. The administration wrote about revenue, and most of what it wrote is gone. What survives instead is the ground. In 2001 construction on the west side of modern Xi'an cut into the market site; the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences excavated for some months under 安家瑤 and exposed the north-east crossroads of the market — road surfaces with cart ruts worn into them, a stone slab bridge over a drain, shop foundations, and drainage channels from more than one period.

The excavation was not backfilled. A museum was put up over it and opened in 2010, so visitors now walk on glass above the roadbed; in 2017 it became the first privately funded museum in China graded 國家一級博物館. Among the objects it holds is the epitaph of 安備, a Sogdian who held office in sixth-century China and whose stone records both Confucian filial duty and Zoroastrian practice — the sort of life the market's own paperwork would have entered as a tax line, had the paperwork lasted as well as the road.

📸 Cover: the excavated West Market crossroads preserved in situ beneath the museum, showing the stone slab bridge and drainage channel, by 猫猫的日记本, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons