A Study On The Cities And Districts Of Northeast China In The Han Dynasty

The Northeastern Border City in this article mainly refers to prefectures such as Youbeiping, Liaoxi, Liaodong, Xuantu and Lelang, which locate in Liaoning Province, the southeastern part of Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region and the northeastern part of Hebei Province today. Among all prefectures mentioned above, Youbeiping, Liaoxi and Liaodong Prefectures are adopted from Yan State and Qin Dynasty, which have played an important part of military defense since Warring States; on the other side, prefectures like Xuantu and Yuelang are settled in Hanwu EmporerPeriod for extensionpolicy at that time, thus Korean Peninsula is also brought into the territory of Han Dynasty. As be on the northeastern border of Han and Wei Dynasty, this area is also a contiguous area against minorities like Hun, Koguryo, Wuhuan, and Xianbei in succession that result in conflicts and wars.The author first takes advantage of historical documents such as The Records of the Grand Historian, History of the Former Han, History of the Latter Han, History of the Three Kingdoms, Commentary on the Water Classic and archaeological reports thenapplies the approaches of Historical Geography and quantitative analysis to analyze all these forty cities in aspect of installment, choice of location, pattern, function and strategic status which leads to a conclusion of characters of the Northeastern border cities in Han and Wei Dynasty.There are four chapters in this article:the first chapter gives a general introduction of the Northeastern Border City in Han and Wei Dynasty and the process of their settlement, which clarifies changes of administrative system and settling time of the cities; with documents and archaeological materials, the second chapter examines and corrects the location and distribution of border cities in Han and Wei Dynasty, defining the location of the most of those cities. The influence of elements like landform, nations, transportation on installment of cities is also discussed; the third chapter states the formation of the Northeastern Border City in Han and Wei Dynasty in archaeological materials, and summarizes all form patterns in aspect of walls, shape of sites and geographical distribution which can reflect the specific characters of these cities; the forth chapter analyzes these cities in Political Historical Geography. The characters of holding a leading post of these cities are summarized as a clue to discuss the strategic status with ethic elements. In a conclusion, the strategic status of Youzhou in war time is higher than that in peaceful period; the status of Liaodong Prefecture is apparently higher than others among all prefectures in the Northeast.