There has been a rich storage of cross-disciplinary research on Chang'an, the capital of the Sui and Tang Dynasties, among which the study from the perspective of urban history has begun to pay attention to the relationship between Chang'an as the capital of the Empire and the local culture of the city. However, no research has been done on the impact of Jiangnan (Yangtze River's south) on Chang'an's urban and cultural life. Although scholars have showed their interest in this important economic and cultural area of the Empire and its macro impact on the fate of the Tang Dynasty, they have not yet studied the elements of Jiangnan embodied in the good taste in the locals' daily life and their cultural pursuit. This paper will focus on the above two points. In the grand territory of the Tang Empire, Chang'an, located on the Guanzhong Plains in the northwest, was its capital city. Jiangnan, the former political center of the Six Dynasties, located in the southeast of the Empire and far away from Chang'an, was gradually growing into an important economic center. Before that, the Grand Canal initiated by Emperor Yangdi of the Sui Dynasty had connected the Guanzhong Plains, the political center, and Jiangnan, the economic zone. Following the same political and geographical pattern of the Sui Dynasty, the rulers of the Tang Dynasty transported the wealth in the form of tax revenues from Jiangnan to Guanzhong through the Grand Canal. In the middle and later period of the Tang Dynasty, Jiangnan became the only economic supplier of the Empire, and the transportation and communication between Jiangnan and Chang'an determined the fate of the Tang Empire. The political and geographical structure of the Tang Empire inevitably led to the integration of the elements of Jiangnan into the multi-cultural life of Chang'an. This cosmopolitan capital accommodated the coexistence of diverse cultures at that time. In addition, the royal families, ministers and powerful clans of the former Liang and Chen Dynasties moved to Chang'an (Daxing in the Sui Dynasty) after the Sui pacified the South, and southern scholars and officials who were active on Chang'an's political and cultural stages in the Tang Dynasty moved to Chang'an. Their presence carried the fresh elements of Jiangnan. The former brought a touch of the romantic customs of the Southern Dynasties, while the latter, with deep affection for their hometown and cultural confidence, blew a breath of fresh air into Chang'an. As a result of Emperor Yangdi of the Sui's infatuation with the southern culture and Emperor Taizong of the Tang's trust and promotion of the southern literati, the latter had such a profound influence on the cultural life of Chang'an that the late Tang Dynasty had a so-called ″Southernization trend″ . Scholars have mostly discussed the Southernization trend from the perspectives of political, academic and cultural history. This paper attempts to examine the Jiangnan elements in Chang'an's urban and cultural life in the Tang Dynasty from the perspectives of its social history and urban history to enrich the study of the capital Chang'an and the regional history of Jiangnan. Although Jiangnan's Fair at Guangyun Tan, the western terminal port of the Grand Canal, showed the prosperity of the heyday under the Kaiyuan reign, the luxurious and elegant Jiangnan elements embodied in clothing and diet, as well as in tea drinking fashion, etc., were still mainly practiced by the royal and bureaucrat families. The Jiangnan elements which were fully embodied in the cultural life of Chang'an, such as calligraphy and painting, music played in the court and taught at the institutions of the court, court poetry and literati's anecdotes, showed that the people's inner value orientation of the Tang Dynasty lay in pursuing the culture of the Southern Dynasties, that is, the culture developed in Jiangnan. The distant shadow of the lonely journey from Chang'an to Jiangnan became a poetic image in Tang poetry.