Personally, I’ve always found travel to be my favourite way to learn about a different culture. The experience of exploring an unfamiliar place curiosity-filled and with an open-mind is unmatched. Learning about a vibrant historical city like Chang’An which has long been lost to time, and not being able to travel there was a real bummer. That disappointment and wanderlust inspired me to create a travel guide — the next best option for learning about a place and its people.
Very often, the spaces that are inhabited by societies get overlooked. A society isn’t just the people or just the place, it is a combination of the two. Even simply through reading scholarly sources, you really get a sense that Chang’An was alive and thriving for most of its existence and I hoped to capture that energy in the guide itself. Metropolitan and diverse, but also societally and physically divided, the city resembles a modern one strikingly well given the fact that it was built in the 7th Century. Imperial Chinese societies were very much socially, economically, and bureaucratically complex, and that couldn’t be more evident in the Tang Capital.
Year 2 (2022), Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (Economics & History)
