Leaving the White Horse Temple and continuing our tour eastward for about two kilometers we see on both sides of the highway that links Luoyang with Yanshi County the remains of numerous mud walls,These were once the city walls of the Luoyang of Han-Wei times.The Old City,as it is now called, extends from Mangshan Hill in the north to the Luo River in the south.If you climb to the top of MangShan and look south,you get a bird's-eye view of the city,or what is left of it-densely laid out foundations and long lines of broken walls.
History tells us that the predecessor of the Luoyang city of Han-Wei was the fortress city of Chengzhou built in the eleventh century B.C.by Zhoul Gong,one of the founders of the Western Zhou.In A.D.25 Liu Xiu of the Eastern Han made the city his capital,and the succeeding dynasties of Wei,Western Jin,and Northern Wei all had their seat of government here.The ruins of the city that we see today are more than nineteen hundred years old,dating back to Liu Xiu's time.It is said that there were twenty-four main streets and three market places in the city.Besides palaces,government offices,temples,parks and gardens,there was also an observatory where Zhang Heng invented the world's first seismograph.
Archaeological discoveries show that this ancient city must have been a prosperous and well-built metropolis at one time. But being the capital of several successive dynasties,it saw much fighting and destruction during the dynastic changes.lt was devastated during Dong Zhuo’s rebellion in the lastyears of the Eastern Han,again during the wars of the eight princes towards the end of the Western Jin,and again during the two uprisings led by Zhu Rong and Gao Huan in the Northern Wei.These repeated devastations have virtually destroyed the city and its buildings.Only parts ofthe city walls remain,according to excavations made to date.The east wall,or what remains of it, measures 3900meters long by four meters wide;the west wall, 4208 meters by 20 meters;and the north wall,3700 meters by 2530meters.The south wall has been completely washed away by the Luo River.These walls were built with slabs of rammed earth.What remains of them averages only one to two meters high,except for the eastern section of the north wall.which is five to seven meters high.Additionally,the sites often city gates have been located.Visitors can only guess from these ruins and from surviving historical records what Luoyang was like during the Han-Wei.