Chapter 3: The Childhood of Humankind

1734 BC: Our Ancestors and the Astronomical Event of the Five Planets Gathering in Lou (五星聚婁)

The following story of the universe by Dr. Park Seok-jae, a research fellow at the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute, was reported in the Chosun Ilbo.
[The author here quotes Dr. Park's column "Park Seok-jae's Story of the Universe" (Premium Chosun). In summary: the Korean Amateur Astronomical Society announced that member Hwangbo Seung had confirmed records of the five planets — Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn — gathering in one place (五星結集) in the histories of Baedal, Goguryeo and Goryeo. Dr. Park recalls his earlier column of October 1, 2014, on the Gojoseon record "Five Planets Gathering in Lou" (五星聚婁).]

[In the national history textbooks, the period from the founding of Gojoseon by Dangun Wanggeom in 2333 BC to the founding of Goguryeo is an almost empty "black hole." Yet in the middle of it stands an astronomical record in the Hwandan Gogi (桓檀古記): "In the fiftieth year, Mujin, the five planets gathered in Lou" (戊辰五十年五星聚婁) — the year being 1733 BC, the 600th anniversary of Gojoseon's founding, and Lou being one of the 28 lunar mansions of Eastern astronomy.]

[(An imagined view of the five planets gathering in Lou. From left: Mars, Mercury, Saturn, Jupiter, Venus.)
Running astronomy software, Dr. Park found that in mid-July 1734 BC the five planets lined up in the western evening sky in the order Mars, Mercury, Saturn, Jupiter, Venus, and that on the evening of July 13, 1734 BC they stood strung "like pearls" between the moon and the sun. Allowing for a one-year error in dating an event 4,000 years ago — especially since the calendar of that time is unknown — this should be regarded as the recorded gathering.]

[He notes that, strictly, the planets gathered near a different lunar mansion, but the name "Five Planets Gathering in Lou" is too well known to be corrected — such things happen often in the history of science. What matters is that the gathering really happened and the old record is correct. Such an event cannot be matched arbitrarily or calculated by hand without a computer, so our ancestors in 1734 BC must have had the organization and culture to record astronomical phenomena. Gojoseon, possessing an observatory, was an ancient state, and should no longer be dismissed as a land of myth.]

[The first astronomers to verify the record were the late Dr. Ra Dae-il and Dr. Park Chang-beom, whose paper "On the Astronomical Records of the Dangun Joseon Period" appeared in the Journal of the Korean Astronomical Society in 1993; it reported one more gathering of the five planets, in February 1953 BC, within the 550 years from 2000 BC to 1450 BC.]

[Because that was 219 years before the Lou gathering, it created the prejudice that such gatherings occur only about once every 200 years. But Dr. Park realized that a gathering can recur within just one year: if Mercury, Venus and Mars quickly regroup before Jupiter and Saturn, with their relatively long orbital periods, drift apart in the sky, it is entirely possible.]
City Planning in East Asia

Population gathered at the mouth of the Yellow River and on the Liaodong Peninsula, where the farming culture of the East Asian coast and the nomadic culture of the interior merged, and the first competitive society in East Asia took shape. Clan society grew into a system of city-states, until the kings of large and small city-states gathered to elect a feudal lord and founded feudal states. Around that time, among that region's underground resources, coal gave the capacity to mass-produce metal, and various metal techniques and products brought revolutionary change to the tools of daily life and to military weapons, and so world civilization began here. A life adapted to the four seasons required the regular effort and discipline of preparing necessities such as food, clothing, housing and fuel before winter came. With metal tools they built large houses and large ships; wheels fitted with metal axles allowed the mass production of chariots that ran fast and far, and wagons were made to carry heavy loads, so that all industries flourished together with the transport industry. Magnetism was discovered and the iron-needle compass invented, so ocean navigation developed; paper was made, so written records flourished, and the exchange of information and the linking of records transcended the limits of place and time. As a large population lived on a broad and vast continent from tens of thousands of years earlier, all the inventions and discoveries of ancient society began in Southeast Asia and were then applied in the competitive society of East Asia.

The Zhou dynasty had Fengjing (酆京), built in 1136 BC, and Haojing (鎬京), built in 1133 BC. Banpo village, where the remains of a prehistoric settlement were excavated and made into a museum, is a village site belonging to the Neolithic Yangshao (仰韶) culture, and C14 dating has shown it to be a settlement more than 6,000 years old. At the Banpo site — a settlement of 50,000 square meters built on the basis of agricultural development at the height of matrilineal clan society, when people "knew their mother but not their father" — houses are distributed around a "great house" 12.5 meters north to south and 10 meters east to west, presumed to have been both the house of the clan chief and the meeting place of the clan's members. Lantian Man (藍田原人) of 800,000 years ago and the Banpo people (半坡人) of 6,000 years ago both led matrilineal clan societies near the Chan River (滻河) east of Xi'an.

Chang'an (Xi'an) is a grid-planned city on an unprecedented scale in history, reaching 9,721 meters east to west and 8,651.7 meters north to south. The circumference of its outer wall reached 37.7 kilometers, and its area was 84.1 square kilometers. Its population reached about one million. Considering that Baghdad, the world city of the time, was 2.3 kilometers in diameter and Constantinople 5 kilometers east to west, we can guess that the vast scale of Chang'an was the scale of an advanced nation.

There is a record that, according to the research of Joseph Needham, famous for Science and Civilisation in China, the Hanlin Academy (翰林院), established in 754 in the Tang (唐代) dynasty, was a thousand years ahead of any academy that existed in Europe. According to the report (Xian, the Model of the East Asian Cities) by Han Pil-won, professor in the School of Architecture at Hannam University, the well-field system (井田法), the farming system of Chinese high antiquity that appears in the capital-city model (九宮格局, the nine-square grid) of the "Kaogongji" (Record of Trades) in the "Winter Offices" of the Rites of Zhou (周禮), seems to have been completed in the Zhou period.

The basic form of royal city layout realized in Chang'an is common to East Asian cities in the city planning of Sanggyeong (上京府) of Balhae in the Manchurian region, Jang'an (長安; Pyongyang) of Goguryeo on the Korean Peninsula, Wanggyeong (王京; Gyeongju) of Silla, and Heijō-kyō (平城京; Nara) and Heian-kyō (平安京; Kyoto) of Japan. The city planning of the Mohenjo-daro site of the Indus civilization, which flourished in 3000–1500 BC, is of the same model. The artifacts excavated there have been presumed to belong to East Asian people.

The Mohenjo-daro site is the urban site at the center of the Indus civilization, which flourished in 3000–1500 BC. It was excavated in 1921–1931 by J. H. Marshall, E. Mackay and others, and in 1950 R. Wheeler also investigated it. The city was divided like a checkerboard by great thoroughfares with a north-south main axis, and in the center of the west side stood a citadel built on a high platform (基壇). The town on the east side was divided into nine blocks by four great thoroughfares, and each block was further divided by several small streets crossing at right angles, along which the households (戶) were arranged; the houses were built of brick. The citadel was surrounded by walls up to 12 m high, long from north to south, about 430 × 230 m in size. Within the citadel are a large building thought to be a temple, a great bath (浴場), a granary, and a building presumed to be an assembly hall; the great bath in particular has a tank 19 × 7.5 m in size and 2.5 m deep. Drainage was arranged so that water flowed through underground drains into the sewers of the main streets.

Looking at the city's zones, the remains of the fortress, the city remains below it, the remains of workers' housing and so on are arranged according to function. Every building in these zones was built of red fired brick. They also dug wells and lined them neatly with brick in a circle; there were as many as 700 wells. Brick was also used for the waterproofed water supply and sewers. The roads ran exactly east–west and north–south, just as a compass points today. Mohenjo-daro is precisely a city designed by professional engineers responsible not only for city planning but for civil engineering. An enormous quantity of brick went into building this city. Because the compass is an iron tool made in the coal fires of East Asia, it leads us to suppose that such city planning began in East Asia.

This meticulous city planning leads us to suppose that thorough administration was carried out, together with the standardization of weights and measures seen in the size of the bricks (standard bricks: 28 cm long, 14 cm wide, 18 cm high) and in the excavated rulers and scale weights. Besides these, artifacts such as pottery, copper ware (銅器), seals (印章) engraved with a script not yet deciphered, and ornaments resemble those of East Asia. These great roads were roads for rolling wheels, and seem to be there because East Asia early on used oxen and horses and had wheels with metal axles.

As seen in the temple architecture of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, with a site where eight waterways surrounded Chang'an, they built dams to secure the water supply and completed a system supplying water for the city and for gardens. They opened grain transport by water and began supplying goods through the waterways. [Per the Zhou model:] the city is 9 li on each side, with three gates on each face. Within the capital, nine roads each run north–south and east–west, and the width of a road is 9 gui (軌; the width a carriage can pass, 1 gui being 8 Zhou feet (周尺)). With the palace-city at the center, the building for sacrifices to the ancestors is placed on the left, and the building for sacrifices to the altars of land and grain on the right. The court is placed in front and the market behind. The market and the court are a pair.

To sum up the process of building the city: first the orientation is fixed, and then the position of the palace and the ceremonial line of the royal capital running south from the palace are determined. That is, the palace is placed at the exact center of the site planned for the royal capital, and from Soyangmun Gate (Chengtianmen Gate of the Tang), the south gate of Daxing Palace at the core of the palace-city, a long north-south axis is laid out due south, running through the city. This north-south axis stretches from Soyangmun Street (Chengtianmen Street of the Tang) to Zhuquemen Street, passes through Mingdemen Gate, the south gate of the outer wall, and reaches the Shibie Valley of Zhongnanshan in the Qinling Mountains. This axis corresponded to the celestial meridian and served as the axis of dynastic ritual.

Along with the construction of the palace-city and the imperial city, main arterial roads were built linking the gates of the outer wall. There were six great streets — three north-south and three east-west — called the Six Streets (六街). After the great streets were fixed, the somewhat smaller roads between them, the small streets (小街), were set. Excluding the roads bordering the outer wall, there are nine north-south roads in all and twelve east-west roads. The last stage of building the royal capital is building the walls of the outer city. Chang'an was composed symmetrically and in good order, with the north-south axis running through the palace-city, the imperial city and the outer city — namely Zhuque Avenue — as its central axis. Centered on the axis, the palaces, government offices, the religious buildings of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism, markets and so on were arranged in bilateral symmetry. The city was divided into two parts, east and west, with Zhuque Avenue at the center.

The model explained in the capital-city form of the "Kaogongji" in the "Winter Offices" of the Rites of Zhou seems to have been formed early on in East Asia, as a city-planning manual shown throughout East Asia and India. It seems that from the Neolithic age, when East Asia's agricultural society was growing, people planned great roads on which wheeled carts moved, and planned cities. The Shang dynasty, which reached the height of metal culture, seems to have formed the finest sphere of civilization in East Asia and passed it on to the Zhou.

The capital-city model recorded in the "Kaogongji" in the "Winter Offices" of the Rites of Zhou seems to have followed the manual, developed longest in the philosophy of yin-yang and the Five Elements, for building capitals not only in China but throughout East Asia, including Korea and Japan. Chang'an is an example of a city that faithfully realized the capital-city model of the "Kaogongji" in the "Winter Offices" of the Rites of Zhou, along with the cities excavated in the Indus basin. It is presumed that the grid-shaped, regular and standardized spatial structure of the capital helped build such a vast city so quickly.