Luoyang

[Lo-yang]. A city in Henan province, China. A few Shang burials have been found at Luoyang but the site evidently had little importance until the Zhou dynasty established a subsidiary capital there, Cheng Zhou, during the reign of the second Western Zhou king (cl000 bc; see Zhou capitals). Even so, Zhou remains at Luoyang are not abundant until the Eastern Zhou period (770256 bc) when the Zhou royal house, having been forced to abandon its Shaanxi capital, resided at Bronzes and pottery recovered from some 270 tombs excavated at Luoyang Zhongzhoulu supply a valuable artefact sequence, described in the excavation report in terms of seven stages, spanning the entire Eastern Zhou period. Particularly rich finds from Jincun, just northeast of the modem city, belong to the latter part of Eastern Zhou; lesser tombs from the end of Eastern Zhou and the Han period have been excavated in large numbers at Shaogou. During the Qin and Western Han dynasties the capital returned to Shaanxi (see Chang’An), but Luoyang was again the capital during the Eastern Han dynasty and, for the last time, from ad 494-535, when the Northern Wei emperors ruled there.