Archaeological Observation on the Layout of the Three Courts and Five Gates of the Daming Palace of the Tang Dynasty

The system of Three Courts and Five Gates is an essential content of the designs of the capitals and palaces of ancient China. The Three Courts and Five Gates planning of the Daming Palace is the adoption of this rule and the application to the spatial designing of the palace city. The archaeological fieldwork revealed that within the Daming Palace, the Three Courts pattern with three walls as the borders, and Hanyuan Hall, Xuanzheng Hall, and Zichen Hall as the centers formed the outer court, middle court, and inner court plan, which was the embodiment of the new interpretation of the Tang Dynasty to the traditional Three Courts and Five Gates ritual system. Through the trimming of the archaeological data fetched in the past 60 years about the southern part, which is the official affair zone, of the Daming Palace, this paper discusses the spatial structure of the Three Courts and Five Gates pattern of the Daming Palace, and analyzes the substantial relationship between this pattern and the political demands of the ruling class.