Temple Cities

East Asia seems to have perfected the idea of the ideal form of the city.  Some of the purest forms of the Ezekiel-type exist in Asia.  Cambodia, for example, is home to the royal monastic and pilgrimage city of Angkor Thom, c. 700-800 A.D., which has a square central temple with avenues leading to four gates in the city walls; the Angkor Wat temple complex in the southern part of this city was itself planned as the city in miniature and is perfectly square and also had a moat around its four walls.

Chinese cities also display thorough consideration of planning and used a three-by-three magic square grid to “correctly” place the palace within it. In the T'ang city of Ch'ang-an, c. 600-700 A.D., for example, a palace occupied the central north square and other monuments were organized around the central north-south street.  Likewise, Peking (modern Beijing), c. 1200-1330 A.D., was first consolidated into a square plan during the Yuan dynasty and was gridded by nine north-south streets and another nine running east-west to create a one hundred block plan.  The Later Ming inner-city plan was defined by three concentric enclosures; axial alignments of gates, courtyards and platforms have, over centuries of rebuilding come to represent a rich sacred landscape.