Dynastic History | Hanyuan Hall, Daming Palace — The Day the Court Moved North

Construction started twice. In 634 Taizong began a summer residence on the 龍首原 ridge north of Chang'an's wall for his retired father; when the old man died the next year the work stopped, and the unfinished compound was renamed 大明宮. It sat that way for a generation. In the fourth month of 龍朔二年 (662) Gaozong restarted it on a much larger scale — the court's own explanation was that the low-lying 太極宮 inside the city was damp — and renamed it 蓬萊宮.

《資治通鑑》, compiled by the Song statesman 司馬光 four centuries after the event, gives the finish in a line: 「蓬萊宮含元殿成，上始移仗居之，更命故宮曰西內」. The Hanyuan Hall was completed, the emperor moved his guard there to live, and the old palace was renamed the Western Interior. Two days later he held court in the Zichen Hall for the first time. That is the mechanism in a sentence: a hall is finished, the centre of the state moves with it, and the previous palace becomes a direction.

含元殿 was the outer audience hall, raised on a rammed-earth terrace so that officials climbed to reach it — for the New Year and winter-solstice assemblies, for envoys, for amnesties read aloud. The chronicle records the day the emperor moved in. It does not record who cut the timber or carried the earth: under the 租庸調 system Tang adult males owed the state grain, cloth and a spell of unpaid labour each year, and the builders enter the record as a tax category.

The palace burned in 896. In 904 the last Tang court was moved to Luoyang and Chang'an was taken apart. Archaeologists surveyed the hall site from 1959; the terrace now carries a grey protective capping inside the heritage park opened in 2010, tower blocks on the skyline behind it.

📸 Cover: the Hanyuan Hall platform under its modern protective capping, not original fabric, Daming Palace National Heritage Park, Xi'an, by 千里走单骑, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons