Luoyang

Capital of the Eastern Han dynasty on the Yellow River, where the rationalist Wang Chong lived and wrote his relentlessly skeptical Lunheng, Balanced Inquiries.

Luoyang became the capital when the Han were restored, and it held the imperial library, which is the detail that matters here. Wang Chong was too poor to buy books and is said to have read them standing in the bookshops of the city until he had them by heart. What he produced was a long and patient attack on the credulity of his age: on omens, on ghosts, on the notion that heaven takes an interest, and on the habit of believing old books because they are old.