Jiujingcheng is one paragraph long. Meng does not linger over buildings or crowds. He gives a perimeter and a sequence of gates. The compression is useful: the old city appears as a spatial framework still legible inside a much larger capital.
1. The capital contains an older capital.
舊京城，方圓約二十里許，南壁其門有三：正南曰朱雀門，左曰保康門，右曰新門。東壁其門有三：從南，汴河南岸角門子，河北岸曰舊宋門，次曰舊曹門。西壁其門有三：從南曰舊鄭門，次汴河北岸角門子，次曰梁門。北壁其門有三：從東曰舊封丘門，次曰景龍門（乃大內城角，寶籙宮前也），次曰金水門。
The old capital measured roughly twenty li around. Its south wall had three gates: Zhuque Gate in the center, Baokang Gate to the left and Xin Gate to the right. The east wall had three passages: beginning in the south, a small corner gate on the south bank of the Bian River, then Old Song Gate on the north bank, followed by Old Cao Gate. The west wall likewise had three: Old Zheng Gate, another corner gate north of the Bian River, and Liang Gate. On the north wall, from east to west, stood Old Fengqiu Gate, Jinglong Gate — at the corner of the imperial enclosure, in front of Baolu Palace — and Jinshui Gate.
The first entry described a forty-plus-li outer city. Here the remembered perimeter drops to about twenty li. The two descriptions sit next to each other because they belong to the same lived capital: an expanded city wrapped around an older core.
The Bian River is already cutting through this older enclosure. Meng uses its banks to locate the small corner gates on the east and west walls. Even before the dedicated river entry begins, water is doing the work of orientation.
2. “Old” here records urban inheritance, not abandonment.
Modern excavation identifies the Northern Song inner city — also called the licheng or old city — as an enclosure inherited from the Tang-period Bianzhou city. The latest work at Jinglong Gate is especially useful because Meng names that gate directly in this paragraph.
Excavation reports describe Jinglong Gate as a three-passage gate complex. The main gate body measured about sixty meters across, with gate passages running roughly twenty meters north–south. The remains combine rammed-earth construction, brick facing and timber structural traces. That does not make every remembered detail automatically exact, but it gives the textual gate list a strong archaeological anchor.
北壁其門有三：從東曰舊封丘門，次曰景龍門……次曰金水門。
Jinglong Gate is one of the places where Meng Yuanlao's compact topographic memory can now be checked against excavated fabric. The gate belongs to the old inner enclosure, while its position also touches the imperial precinct. One named point therefore ties together the inner wall, palace geography and the later archaeological map of Kaifeng.
