With a walled city of thirty square miles and a population of more than one million, Chang'an, capital of the Tang dynasty, was the largest city in the world at the time. Through reading texts in different genres including official history, governmental documents, literary collections, anecdotes, legal codes, and stone inscriptions along with secondary scholarship, this course introduces the political, ritual, and economic structures of the city, and explores the lives of its citizens that in different ways either maintained or challenged these structures.