The order follows that of the four directions, not historical sequence. Cháng'ān, now Xī‘ān in Shǎnxī Province and known in history as the Hàn "xījīng," or "Western Capital", was established as capital by Emperor Gāozǔ, named Liú Bāng, the dynastic founder of the Western (or Former) Hàn in 206 BCE. Luòyáng, now in Hénán Province and still known as such, was established as dōng jīng (or eastern capital) by Liú Xiū, Emperor Guāngwǔ, when he founded the Eastern (or Later) Hàn over two centuries later in 25. These were thus the two capitals of China during the glorious Hàn Dynasy. The capital in Zhōu Xìngsì's time, at the writing of this work during the Southern Dynasties' Liáng, (sometimes called Xiāo Liáng after the real name of Liáng's founder Wǔ Xiāo Yǎn), was Jiàn Kāng, site of present day Nánjīng, Jiāngsū Province. Zhāng Héng of the Eastern Hàn left us a literary work of interest called Èr Jīng Zeí, about the two capitals. Dōngjīng was also the name of other Chinese dynastic capitals; in the Northern Sòng, Kāifēng and in the alien Jìn and Liáo, Liáoyáng. The Jìn "Xījīng" was Dàtong. Dōngjīng is of course what the Japanese in modern times began calling their Edo bakufu's capital: Tōkyō.

To Luòyang's north is Mt. Máng; the city faces (fronts on) the River Luò. Thus it is literally "north of Luò," as the north bank of a river in China is the yáng, or sunlit side. Similarly, the south side of a mountain is its yáng side, respectively. A saying goes: "shān yáng, nán; hé yáng, beǐ" literally, "Mt. Yáng south, River Yáng north". Cháng'ān stretches between the Rivers Wèi and Jīng. The Jīng is a tributary of the Wèi, and the Wèi in its turn is a tributary of the great Yángzǐ Jiāng.

Palace after palace, winding around endlessly; views from the towering buildings high enough to frighten one as if in flight. These lines describe the awesome splendor of the buildings of these two capitals.

Engraved, drawn or painted decorations, icons and murals on the walls, structural beams and rafters etc of ancient palaces, temples and official buildings were commonly depictions of dragons, phoenixes, white tigers, storks and other marvelous, often legendary creatures. Also present were color paintings portraying gods, fairies, spirits, humans, and legendary figures and scenes, decorating walls, pillars, the insides of flying eaves etc.

The bǐng shè (literally ‘third' or ‘tertiary', ‘dormitory') was the unit of rooms where the imperial concubines lived, its entrance at the front of the main palace. Its entrance curtains open outward, fine tapestried drapes bunched against two handsome vermilion pillars at the sides. An account in the Hàn Wǔ Gù Shì, "Stories from Hàn Wǔdì's Reign", cited in the Huáxià reader by Xu and others, says that "Hàn Wǔdì used pearl and jade-inlaid fine drapery; inside, incense was offered to the statues of gods." This, according to illustration in the little reader probably meant an incense altar with a heavy, ornate tripod and vessel full of ashes in which the sticks were placed, and an elaborate table with food offerings before the likenesses.

In the palace they indulged in entertainment with endless places set, with musicians playing drums and chimes, the long Chinese zither, and pipes. "Singers, long-sleeved dancers and musicians performed in pleasant weather and cold," a late Táng observer, the sharply satirical poet Dù Mù wrote in Ā fáng gōng zeí, cited in the Huáxià reader.

The two classes of officials, wén and wǔ, civil and military, mount the stairs to the platform of Heaven, to be admitted to the Emperor's presence. The many hats indicate the presence of so many black ceremonial hats, sparkling like all of the stars in the night sky as they bob and turn. Just as in ancient Rome, the outstanding men and women of the day would become stars in the night sky after death; truly luminaries. "As many as the twinkling bright stars are the vanity mirrors," Dù wrote, (cited above); he meant the myriad concubines and courtesans, with plots and tricks and tricks to match. The Doctrine of the Mean (ch. 26) uses the image of the stars strung across the night sky to convey the the infiniteness yet integrity of creation.

Guǎng nèi, literally the "wide sanctum" refered to the Imperial library; chéng míng The name of a Hàn period palace for high officials, literally "riders of brightness," "illuminaries," etc; their study and rest quarters. Here we have progressed from the main palace to other palatial quarters; the inner library collections and the outer stacks and quarters for scholars, ministers of state and generals. The ostentatious and excessive buildings and surroundings probably seemed quite natural to them.

Fén diǎn refers to the Sānfán and Wǔdiǎn, legendary books of early antiquity, the Sānfán dealing with Páoxī, Shénnóng, and the Yellow Emperor with a treatise on the Great Way, passed along in the Kǒng'ānguó Shàng Shū (the Book of History)—both are mentioned in the Zuǒzhuàn. Marvelous and rare books were kept in the guangnei (‘inner sanctum') of the library building for use by court personel, high ministers and their guests. Closer to the outside were the stacks and facilities accessible to all officials and scholars. Qún yīng is a phrase still used in today's Chinese press, meaning ‘young lions' or the ‘brave and bold', those idealistic ones, particularly youth, who are eager to serve.

Rough drafts were often written in cursive hand, or caoxie, so works of calligraphy in this style are often refered to as gǎo, or drafts. Dù Dù of Hàn Zhāngdì's reign (76–89) was famed for his beautiful cursive characters, refered to in these lines. Likewise, Zhōng Yóu of Cáo Wèi was famed for his lìshū: his clerical style of calligraphy. A bit late, but the succeeding Cáo Wèi's capital was Luóyàng also, from 220 to 265. Qīshū were the ancient books comprised of bamboo lips strung together, with characters brushed on in lacquer. The Bìjīng were the famous lost works of Kǒngzǐ in ancient characters recovered by the fifth son of Hàn Jǐngdì, invested as the King of Lǔ, known as Lǔ Gōngwáng around 150 BCE from inside a broken-down wall at the Sage's former home in Qūfù, Shāndōng, over three hundred years after his death. The king was demolishing Kǒngzǐ' old house for an expansion of his palace when the discovery was made. The works included the old character text of the Book of History, Book of Poems, Classic of Filial Piety, among others.

From inside the palace the top civil and military leadership parade out in two parallel lines, through a gauntlet of the various lower ranking palace officials flanking the path. Jiàng xiāng, generals and ministers of state, means the top court officials, civil and military, and huái qīng (two official classifications) refer to all the lower court officials. In many places in eastern Asia today, graduating students leave school after commencement down a walkway lined on both sides by their applauding classmates from the lower grades.

Fēng (originally, ‘to plant a ceremonial spear into the earth') is to bestow a credential in function like the Roman fasces—to grant a feudal title and empowerment, the right to build a fortified capital, maintain over 1,000 armed troops, and take in the harvests of the land and people shí yì to members of the royal family or distinguished ministers, and to the officers and so on. In its ideal form the subjects, able-bodied men dīng and women kǒu, were highly organized into basic agricultural units, five hù (‘households') to a ‘lín' (‘neighborhood', ‘block', ‘barracks' in a sense), five lín to a lǐ (‘village'), and 500 lǐ in turn organized into a xiāng (‘district'), more or less comprising a xiǎn (‘county' as above)—in those times, receiving some of their basic needs from the local king. A typical grant of eight counties would thus have ideally comprised about 100,000 subjects. This complete feudal society began with the early Zhōu, around 1100 BCE. The Book of Poems tells us "qī yuè liú huǒ，bā yuè shòu yī" (‘in the seventh month the fire* floats by, in the eighth month we receive our clothes'): it touchingly portrays how the lowest subjects passed a an entire year in the Zhōu society under idealized conditions. Such a ruler would be granted the right to the harvest and other duties and services, and to muster and keep men under arms. The eight counties were each administered for the feudal lord by a sub-invested xiàn zhèng, or ‘magistrate'. Qín Shǐ Huángdì did away with this system and established a more centralized rule over xiǎn and sjun (‘subcounties') but the Hàn obliterated all traces of that, and returned to the Zhōu system of xiǎn, but with stronger centralized imperial rule for the most part. Feudal grants and titles continued into modern times, however. In Qín and Hàn times, officials called xiànlìng (for counties with over 10,000 households) or a xiànzhǎng (smaller counties) were appointed to administer the areas.

* Movements of fireflies, shooting stars, (Perseid meteor showers) or huǒxīng (‘Mars')—perhaps all three. This would be in late August or September. Imagine the star-studded black sky that the Zhōu people transcendentally and abstractly worshipped, with its infinite twinkling bodies viewed from the darkened full fields, ready for harvesting, with myriad fireflies dancing, leaving their traces in the crisp late summer nights and meteorites similarly racing and vanishing overhead. The movement of Mars crossing overhead would indicate the approach of harvest time.

Wearing their tall ceremonial hats, the feudal lords escort the imperial chariot on a pleasure drive; they drive their teams fast enough to set the long ribbon trim on their hats fluttering back in the resulting wind. Driving was an activity that the ancient Chinese, including Kǒngzǐ, felt was well suited to a highminded, refined and gentlemanly ruler.

The offspring of these feudal grant receivers were a hereditary aristocracy, entitled by law to fat emoluements. According to the the Book of History, cited in the Huáxià reader, "shì lù zhī jiā, xián kè yǒu lǐ": "Among the entitled families, few had any manners or knew the rites". This early source shows that the elaborate practice of recorded hereditary privilege and grants was already in place in Shang times, 1600–1100 BCE, before the Zhōu. History records that Hàn Gāozǔ invested his minister Cáo Shēn as Píngyáng Hóu, a hereditary grant including the grant lands as well as his government post.

The Zhōu imperial court kept assiduous records of the feudal kings' virtuous acts and glorious achievements on bamboo slips strung together into scrolled books, and ordered their names and deeds carved into stone monuments they erected. cè and lè are verbal, the former meaning "to record on bamboo slips," and the later, "to carve".

The Pán is a river southeast of Bǎojī City in Shǎnxī where, as legend goes, Jiāng Tài Gōng Lǚ Shàng was fishing when befriended by Zhōu Wǔwáng. He became Wǔwáng's close political and military advisor and was entrusted with many important decisons and responsibilities, such as in the destruction of wicked last King Zhòu's Yin-Shang and establishment of the Zhōu rule over all the states. zuó is "assist"; shí is an elliptical form of shí zhèng, meaning the governmental decisionmaking and administrative issues of the time. Yī Yín was in much earlier times discovered by Tāng of Shāng and dubbed Ā Héng, from that time on another name for Prime Minister. He similarly advised in the campaign to punish Xià's bad king Jié, end the Xià and found the Shāng. Both aided in making decisions on problems of the day and were relied on in important matters of state. The recruitment of talented and good men, in these early times a simple and idyllic matter of chance meeting, later became a central issue in Chinese civilization.

Yǎn was a very ancient state's name, east of Qǔfù, Shāndōng. It was later to become the state of Lǔ and the birthplace of Kǒngzǐ. Dǎn was the Duke of Zhōu, surname Jī, given name Dǎn, a brother of Zhōu Wǔ Wáng, Jī Fā. Wēi here means "without," and shú is "who," or "where" like the modern Chinese shuí or ná. Not long after he destroyed the Shang, Zhōu Wuwáng died of illness, and out of four younger brothers Zhōu Gōng Dǎn, the Duke of Zhōu, Dǎn, assisted his younger brother, still a child, who had become wénwáng (the Great King Wén) in building and stabilizing the Zhōu state. "Where would we have been in the Qūfù campaign without the Duke of Zhōu? Without Dǎn, then who"?

Qì's leader Huán Gōng assembled his feudal lords and their forces nine times to aid weaker and endangered states. With Guān Zhòng as Prime Minsister, he followed a policy of internal strength and external alliances to great advantage, becoming the first of the Zhōu bà. This is discussed in the "Wen De" section of Analects. His armed forces came to the aid of the small states Yǎn and Wèi when they were endangered by alien tribes, the Rong and Di.

Qǐ Jìlǐ is one of the Shāngshān sìhào (‘four hermits of Shāngshān'). With white hair and beards they came down from their isolation to aid Hàn Huìdì when, as crown prince, he was challenged for the throne by another son of the late Gāozǔ. Wǔdīng was a Shāng king who legendarily dreamt of a perfectly cultivated minister and was deeply affected, moved to drawing the man of his dream in a picture and then tiring himself out in a search for that ideal official: Fù Yuě (the same Yuě as above).

These lines refer to the selfless duty, sacrifice and even death in obscurity of the best and most talented officials, civil and military, on which the empire's strength, prosperity and tranquility rested. In old China, the most talented individuals were styled jùn, the brilliant and beautiful, the ‘one in a thousand'; next came the yì, the best and brightest, the ‘one in a hundred'.

In the Warring States Period, Sū Qín proposed a coalition of six states against Qín, and this was known as the hécóng or ‘alliance', noted for the hegemonic stands of Jìn and Chǔ; Zhāng Yì advocated a pro-Qín group which historians call the liánhéng or ‘axis', in which each would resist Qín on their own. After the liánhéng was created, the states of Zhào and Wèi began to feel the pressure from Qín's first onslaughts.

Jìn's Duke Xiàn used the state of Lú's territory to march through on his way to annihilating the small country of Guó. On their way back, his troops returned the favor by eliminating their host country as well. Another Jìn ruler, Duke Wén, held a meeting on the soil of neighboring Zhèng, after defeating Chǔ at the battle of Chéngpú, and met with all the feudal lords there, forging an alliance. These acounts from the Zuǒzhuàn (one version of the Spring and Autumn Annals) compare evil and moral behavior on the part of kings.

Xiāo Hé was Hàn Gāozǔ's Prime Minister. Soon after the establishment of the Hàn, Gāozǔ discarded Qín's complicated legal code and had Xiāo Hé draft a new and simplified code of laws, based on the traditional "Nine Articles," to suit needs of the new times. Earlier, the original innovator and advocate of Qín's system, the famous Legalist philosopher Hán Fēi, was wrongly accused by enemies and, ironically, died during harsh punishment under his own retributive code.

Qín's generals Bái Qǐ and Wáng Jiǎn, and Zhào's generals Lián Pō and Lǐ Mù were in antiquity the most respected of all for their prowess as military commanders. Note again the practice of refering to officials intimately by their first name, very commonly seen in Chinese documents down to recent times in traditional China. For example, in the 19th century Qīng court documents we can see Zēng Guófān's Xiāng Army refered to as ‘Guó's forces'.

Shā mò (‘desert') refers to the far flung deserts and remote border areas of China in general. The former dynasties of China maintained memorial halls with paintings of illustrious past officials, such as the Táng's língyangé; the practice might have begun in the Warring States period.

Yǔ the Great left his footprints in the form of water control works all over the ancient jiǔzhōu (‘nine states'), also a traditional name for China. These were the districts of very early China: Yī, Yù, Yōng, Yáng, Yǎn, Xú, Liáng, Qīng and Jīng. The Japanese much later named their southernmost home island Kyushyu after it. The bǎijùn (or ‘hundred districts') here is another one of these traditional names for the country. Qín unified the land into 36 big districts; Hàn later discarded this system and used 103 jùn instead.

Of the five sacred mountains, the one of the East, called variously by the common term tàishān or the more religious Dàiyuè or Dàizōng, in Shāndōng Province, is the most important and the place where the fèng ceremony is held at the summit, in which an emperor sacrifices to heaven and consecrates or reconsecrates the dynasty. Rulers sacrificed to earth in the chán ceremony, conducted at the foot of the mountain on two smaller peaks, Yún (Yúnyúnshān in southeastern Tái'ān County, Shāndōng—considered part of Tàishān's range), and Tíng (Tíngshān in southwestern Zhāngqiū County, Shāndōng). The other holy mountains of China are Mt. Huà in the west, Mt. Héng (衡) in the south, Mt. Héng (恒) in the north, and Mt. Sōng at center.

Mt. Yǎnmén, meaning ‘Goosegate' is in the northwest part of modern Shānxī Province: Yǎnmén Pass is formed by the saddle between its peaks. It is the home of the family of eternal supernatural foxes in the long version of the novel Píng Yāo Zhuǎn and is cited here as an example of a famous scenic mountain pass. There are also districts, counties, towns, and at least one river by this name. Zǐsài (‘purple wall') is another word for the Great Wall, what the Chinese call the Wànlǐ chángchéng, (‘10,000 lǐ Great Wall'). Another such old name is the xuánsài (or ‘black wall', with the additional meaning of ‘dark spirits', ‘ghosts', and so on). Jītián must have been well known in Zhōu Xìngsì's day as a relay and refreshment station for the mails and travelers, but today it is chiefly known for its inclusion in this line—that is the first definition in the old Cíhǎi. It is recorded there as a district name in Héběi and Níngxià. According to our new Chinese little reader, it was a relay station in contemperary Héběi. Chìchéng, the ‘redwall', is a mountain in the Tiāntaí range of Zhèjiāng, one of great religious significance in east Asian Buddhism as the tiāntái zōng. Tiāntai Zōng denomination was founded there by Zhǐ Yì (538–597) shortly after Zhōu Jingsi's lifetime. The early Japanese worshipped mountains too—before Buddhism's introduction and after—and gave the name Chìchéng—pronounced Akagi in Japanese—to a mountain in central Honshyu, near Tokyo.

Kūnchí is apparently not Yúnnán's famed Kūnmíng Lake, but rather Hàn Emperor Wǔdì's privately dug imitation in the northwest of Chángshā County, Shǎnxī Province, a once-splended pool, now dried up. In Zhōu Xìngsì's day it was still noteworthy. It is also known as the diānchí, named after the Yúnnán (Diān) original. Jiéshí (‘Tablet Rock') is a peak northwest of Chānglí in in Héběi's Fǔníng County. From this vantage point one can see the Bóhǎi. Fǔníng is one of the ‘four counties' of greater Qínhuángdǎo, China's northernmost ice-free port, with the famed ‘first pass under heaven' at Shānhǎi Guān and the Běidàihé seashore resort. In Míng times, a thousand years after Zhōu Xìngsì's passing, the Great Wall fortification system was extended throughout this area at tremendous cost, in defense against the Nüzhen and other nomadic peoples, and, in the Wànlì era (c. 1592), in expectation of an invasion by the Japanese warlord Hideyoshi Toyotomi—that was eventually stopped short in Korea. Hideyoshi brought great suffering to the Korean people and helped bring on the financial bankruptcy of the Míng. Today, the Jiāoshān Great Wall in Qínhuángdǎo probably gives the grandest Bóhǎi panorama of all. Jùyě refers to an Everglades-like swamp formerly in Jùyě County, eastern Shāndōng. This is north China, but in Zhōu Xìngsì's day it might have have been warmer than it is now: the famed Cáo Cāo is said to have grown oranges at Luòyáng. At any rate, the huge swamp dried out during the subsequent ages, perhaps from a combination of climate change and human activities. Lastly, if it's lakes that you fancy, take a look at Lake Dòngtíng in Húnán, one of China's most famous bodies of water and a world famous tourist attraction.

More on the infinite and profound beauty of China, its waters, earth and climate. This concludes Chapter 4 of the Qiānzì wén, which progressed from cultural to physical geography.