Loyang

Loyang: see Luoyang, China.

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Luoyang, Loyang

a city in E China, in N Henan province on the Luo River near its confluence with the Yellow River; an important Buddhist centre in the 5th and 6th centuries; a commercial and industrial centre. Pop.: 1 594 000 (2005 est.)

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Loyang 

a city in China, in Honan Province, on the Lo Ho (Huang Ho basin). Population, 450,000 (1958). It has a railroad station and is a highway junction. During the years of people’s power, Loyang has become a large industrial center with well-developed machine-building and metalworking industry (plants producing tractors, mining equipment, and ball bearings). There are also woodworking, pulp-and-paper, and food industries. Coal and iron ore are mined near Loyang.

According to tradition, the city was founded in 1108 B.C. It was originally called Loyi and was the capital of a number of Chinese dynasties: the Chou (770-516 B.C.), when the city was known as Wang-ch’eng; the Later Han (A.D. 25-220), during which the first university in China was founded in Loyang; the Western Chin (265-316); the Northern Wei (386-534), when the city became Loyang; and the Later T’ang (tenth century). In later times, it was the chief town of a district. A great number of historical and artistic structures of all periods (especially the tenth century) have been preserved: the city walls, palaces, temples, and imperial mausoleums. Sites of the Neolithic Yangshao and Lungshan cultures have been discovered; other archaeological finds include settlements and kilns for firing pottery of the Yin era and the fourth and third centuries B.C., about 2,000 pit burials of the Western Chou period, and more than 1,000 stone burial vaults of the Han period. The Pai Ma Sze temple, one of the first Buddhist temples in China (founded in A.D. 68), and the Lung Men cave temple (fifth to ninth centuries), both located in the environs of Loyang, are especially well known. In 1958 a historical museum was opened near Loyang, in the former Kuan Yii temple in the village of Kuanglin; it has a large collection of iron implements, inscribed stone stelae, bronze vessels, metal mirrors, and weapons.

REFERENCE

Viatkin, R. V. Muzei i dostoprimechatel’nosti Kitaia. Moscow, 1962.