Xi’an, China

The City That Started China

Xi’an sits in the Wei River valley of Shaanxi Province in central China, and for roughly a thousand years across multiple dynasties, it was the most important city on earth. Thirteen imperial dynasties made it their capital, including the Qin, Han, and Tang — three of the most consequential periods in Chinese history. Before Beijing was Beijing, before Shanghai had a skyline, Xi’an was the beating heart of a civilization, the eastern terminus of the Silk Road, and a city of over a million people at a time when London barely had a hundred thousand. That weight of history hasn’t crushed the place — it has given it an extraordinary sense of identity. Modern Xi’an is a city of nine million people, heavy traffic, bubble tea shops, and neon-lit malls, but the past is never far beneath the surface. You can be eating spiced lamb skewers beside a Tang Dynasty minaret one moment and stepping through a Han Dynasty city gate the next. Few cities in the world wear their history this comfortably.

The Terracotta Army — What to Expect Beyond the Headlines

Everyone arrives at the Museum of the Terracotta Warriors with some mental image formed from documentaries and photographs. The reality is both more impressive and more complicated than you expect. The site is located about 40 kilometers east of Xi’an near the town of Lintong, and it protects the funerary complex of Qin Shi Huang, China’s first emperor, who died in 210 BCE. The warriors — over 8,000 discovered so far — were buried in three separate pits to guard his tomb in the afterlife.

Pit 1 is the one everyone photographs: a vast excavation hall containing row upon row of life-size clay soldiers, each with individualized facial features. Standing on the viewing platform above them, the scale hits you in a way images never quite capture. But Pit 2 is arguably more interesting for those who slow down — it contains cavalry, archers, and officers, and sections of it remain deliberately unexcavated, letting you see soldiers emerging half-formed from the earth, arms and torsos protruding from the raw soil. Pit 3 is smaller but holds command-level figures and chariots.

The bronze chariots displayed in a separate building are stunning and often overlooked. So is the museum section containing warrior heads, preserved pigment traces showing the original vivid paint, and crossbow mechanisms that still function after two millennia. Go early — the site opens at 8:30 AM — and if you can visit on a weekday in shoulder season, the crowds are manageable. Hiring a licensed guide at the entrance is genuinely worthwhile; the context they provide transforms a museum walkthrough into something far more absorbing. Emperor Qin Shi Huang’s actual tomb mound, a massive earthen hill visible nearby, remains unexcavated — Chinese archaeologists are waiting for technology sufficient to preserve what they believe lies inside.

Inside the Ancient City Walls — The Walled City’s Neighbourhoods and Street Life

Xi’an’s Ming Dynasty city wall, completed in 1370, is one of the best-preserved ancient fortification systems in China. It’s a rectangle of tamped earth and brick stretching 14 kilometers in total circumference, with watchtowers, battlements, and four great gates. You can rent a bicycle at any of the gates and cycle the entire perimeter in about two hours — a genuinely enjoyable way to see the city from above and watch the contrast between the ancient ramparts and the modern city pressing in on all sides.

Within the walls, the city divides itself into distinct zones. The central Bell Tower, a 15th-century wooden tower rising above a busy traffic roundabout, marks the geographic and symbolic heart of the old city. Nearby, the Drum Tower signals the edge of the Muslim Quarter to the northwest. South of the Bell Tower, the streets around Nanmen (South Gate) are calmer and more residential, with teahouses, antique shops, and small restaurants tucked into lanes that haven’t changed their basic shape in centuries.

The area around Shuyuanmen — a pedestrian street leading to the South Gate — is worth an afternoon. It’s lined with calligraphy shops, ink and brush vendors, traditional painting studios, and stalls selling rubbings of historical stone tablets. It’s tourist-oriented, certainly, but the craft is genuine, and watching a calligrapher work is something worth pausing for. The Small Wild Goose Pagoda neighborhood, slightly outside the southern wall, has been thoughtfully developed into a park with the pagoda as centerpiece — quieter than the main tourist drag and a good place to see local families on weekend mornings.

The Muslim Quarter and Hui Culture — Food, Faith, and the Silk Road’s Living Legacy

The Muslim Quarter — Huimin Jie and its surrounding lanes — is not a tourist construction. It’s a real, functioning neighborhood where Xi’an’s Hui Muslim community, descendants of Arab and Central Asian merchants who settled here during the Tang Dynasty, has lived continuously for over a thousand years. The Great Mosque at its center dates to 742 CE, though most of what stands today was rebuilt during the Ming and Qing eras. It’s architecturally unique — a mosque built entirely in Chinese architectural style, with pavilions, courtyards, and gardens rather than domes and minarets. Non-Muslim visitors are welcome in the outer courtyards; the prayer hall itself is reserved for worshippers.

The lanes around the mosque are genuinely dense with life — butcher stalls, grain merchants, spice vendors, women making hand-pulled noodles in doorways, and restaurants that have been in the same family for generations. The main pedestrian street (Beiyuanmen) gets crowded with visitors in the evenings, and some of the stalls have adjusted their offerings toward tourist tastes, but explore one block off the main drag and you’ll find the neighborhood operating entirely on its own terms. The sounds, the smells of cumin and charcoal, the call to prayer from the mosque — it all adds up to an atmosphere found nowhere else in China.

Beyond the Big Sites — Lesser-Known Temples, Pagodas, and Hidden Corners

Xi’an’s reputation rests so heavily on the Terracotta Army and the city walls that its other historic sites tend to be undervisited, which means you can often have them nearly to yourself.

The Shaanxi History Museum ranks among the finest museums in China and deserves at least half a day. Its collection covers Chinese history from prehistoric times through the Tang Dynasty, with extraordinary objects: Zhou Dynasty bronzes, Han Dynasty jade suits, Tang gold and silver artifacts, and some of the most beautiful Tang murals ever recovered from tomb walls. Admission to the main galleries is free, though the special exhibition halls covering Tang tomb murals charge separately and are worth it.

The Big Wild Goose Pagoda was built in 652 CE to house Buddhist scriptures brought back from India by the monk Xuanzang — the historical figure behind the novel Journey to the West. The pagoda itself is a solid seven-story Tang structure, and climbing it gives good views over the southern city. The surrounding plaza, though enormous and somewhat sterile, hosts a large musical fountain show in the evenings that local families treat as a genuine event.

The Forest of Stone Steles Museum, housed in a former Confucian temple complex near the South Gate, contains thousands of stone tablets inscribed with classical texts, calligraphy by famous scholars, and historical records going back to the Han Dynasty. It’s quiet, intellectually absorbing, and gives a completely different window into Chinese cultural history than the archaeological sites. The Nestorian Stele here — a Tang-era stone documenting the arrival of Christian missionaries in China in 635 CE — is one of the most remarkable historical objects in Xi’an.

Xi’an’s Food Scene — A Culinary Culture Built on Wheat, Lamb, and Fire

Xi’an’s food is one of the most distinctive regional cuisines in China. Unlike the rice-centric cooking of southern China, Xi’an’s food is built on wheat — noodles, flatbreads, and dumplings in forms you won’t find elsewhere — combined with the lamb, cumin, and chili that came in along the Silk Road. If you’ve only eaten Cantonese or Sichuan food, Xi’an’s cuisine will feel like a genuinely different culinary world.

The dish every visitor eventually eats is biang biang noodles — wide, hand-pulled noodles the width of a belt, served with chili oil, vinegar, garlic, and often minced pork or braised lamb. The name comes from the sound the dough makes when slapped against the table, and the character used to write it is reputedly the most complex Chinese character in existence. A proper bowl is filling enough to constitute a full meal and costs almost nothing.

Yangrou paomo is the other iconic local dish: a slow-cooked lamb and bread soup in which the diner tears their own flatbread into small pieces (the smaller the pieces, the more you know what you’re doing) before handing it to the kitchen to be combined with rich lamb broth, vermicelli, and pickled garlic on the side. It’s a deeply savory, restorative meal, especially in cold weather. Find it at any of the established paomo restaurants near the Drum Tower area.

In the Muslim Quarter, street food comes fast and aggressively: lamb skewers (chuanr) grilled over charcoal with cumin and chili, rou jia mo (minced spiced meat inside a sesame flatbread — often called a Chinese hamburger), cold rice noodles dressed with chili and vinegar, persimmon cakes fried in oil, and pomegranate juice freshly squeezed to order. The quality is genuinely high — this is a community that has been feeding people for centuries and knows exactly what it’s doing.

For dumplings, the Tang Dynasty Dumpling Banquet at some of the older state restaurants is worth a splurge — dozens of dumplings shaped like fish, crabs, phoenixes, and other symbols, each with a different filling. It’s theatrical but the dumplings are technically accomplished. For everyday dumpling eating, the side streets around the Bell Tower area have reliable spots serving jiǎozi in the local style.

Getting Around Xi’an — Navigating a Sprawling Ancient City

Xi’an is large and spread out in ways that make it feel bigger than its historical core suggests. The good news is that its public transit has improved dramatically over the past decade.

The metro is the most practical tool for getting around the city. Several lines connect the major districts, with key stops near the Bell Tower, the South Gate, the train stations, and the Tang Paradise park. Tickets are purchased from machines at each station using cash or Alipay/WeChat Pay. For foreigners without a Chinese bank account, having some cash is essential.

For reaching the Terracotta Army, the most straightforward option is Tourist Bus Route 5 (also labeled Bus 306 on some maps), which departs from near Xi’an Railway Station and runs directly to the site for a few yuan. Alternatively, metro Line 9 now connects Xi’an North Railway Station with the Terracotta Army area, making it considerably easier than it used to be.

Taxis are metered and relatively cheap within the city, though drivers rarely speak English and will benefit from having your destination written in Chinese characters. Didi (China’s ride-hailing equivalent of Uber) is more convenient once set up — the international version of the app accepts foreign payment methods but may require some patience to configure before you arrive.

Within the walled city, walking is genuinely the best mode of transport. Most of the central sites are within 20-30 minutes of each other on foot, and the streets reward slow movement. Bicycles and e-scooters are available to rent near major gates for exploring the walls themselves.

Day Trips from Xi’an — Mountains, Tombs, and River Valleys Within Reach

Xi’an’s location in the Wei River basin puts it within reach of some remarkable landscapes and historical sites.

Mount Hua (Huashan) is about 120 kilometers east of Xi’an and is one of China’s Five Sacred Mountains, known for the near-vertical hiking routes that scale its multiple peaks. The mountain has become famous in recent years for the so-called “world’s most dangerous hiking trail” — a plank walk along a cliff face that requires harness attachment — but beyond that theatrical element, the mountain is genuinely spectacular: granite peaks wrapped in cloud, ancient Taoist temples clinging to ledges, and views across the Guanzhong Plain that extend to the horizon. A cable car reaches the north peak; serious hikers do the full ascent on foot. Trains from Xi’an North reach Huashan in about 40 minutes.

The Famen Temple complex, about 90 kilometers west of Xi’an, holds one of Buddhism’s most sacred relics — a finger bone of the Buddha — discovered in a sealed Tang Dynasty underground vault in 1987. The modern museum built around the discovery is architecturally striking (designed by Andrew Bao and Fuksas), and the relics themselves, including astonishing Tang imperial offerings of gold, silver, and glass, are displayed with care. The temple complex that surrounds the new museum is active and atmospheric, particularly during festival periods.

The Han Yangling Mausoleum is a thoroughly undervisited alternative to the Terracotta Army. It’s the tomb of Han Emperor Jing Di (died 141 BCE), and it was excavated and opened in the 1990s. Instead of full-size warriors, the Han tombs contain thousands of small nude ceramic figurines — originally clothed in real silk and holding real weapons — along with ceramic horses, pigs, sheep, chickens, and cattle. The museum is built directly over the excavation pits with glass floors, allowing visitors to walk above the ongoing dig and look directly down at the figures below. It’s one of the more innovative archaeological museum designs in China.

For something completely different, the Qianling Mausoleum about 80 kilometers northwest of Xi’an contains the joint tomb of Tang Emperor Gaozong and Empress Wu Zetian — the only female emperor in Chinese history. The tomb itself remains unexcavated, but the processional avenue leading to it, lined with enormous stone sculptures of horses, lions, ostriches, and foreign dignitaries, is extraordinarily evocative. Satellite tombs nearby have been excavated and contain remarkable Tang murals accessible to visitors.

Practical Tips for Visiting Xi’an — Seasons, Costs, Connectivity, and Common Pitfalls

When to go: Spring (April–May) and autumn (September–October) are the best times to visit. Temperatures are comfortable, skies tend to be clearer, and the city is at its most photogenic. Summer (June–August) brings heat, humidity, and the peak tourist season — expect significant crowds at major sites. Winter is cold and occasionally sees snowfall, but the Terracotta Army Museum and indoor sites remain fully operational, and crowds thin considerably. If you’re visiting Beijing or Shanghai as part of a longer China trip, Xi’an connects easily to both by high-speed rail.

Getting to Xi’an: Xi’an Xianyang International Airport handles direct flights from major Chinese cities and a growing number of international routes. High-speed trains from Beijing take around 4.5 hours; from Shanghai, about 6 hours. Xi’an is a major hub on the national rail network and connects to virtually everywhere in China.

Connectivity: China’s Great Firewall blocks Google, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and most Western social media platforms. Download a reliable VPN before entering China — once inside the country, downloading one becomes significantly more difficult. Maps.me works offline and is useful for navigation. Baidu Maps is the local alternative and more accurate for Chinese addresses, though it’s in Chinese.

Payment: China has moved heavily toward mobile payment, and many small restaurants and street food stalls don’t readily accept cash, let alone foreign credit cards. WeChat Pay and Alipay are the dominant platforms, and both now have international versions that accept foreign cards — setting these up before or immediately upon arrival is strongly recommended. ATMs accepting foreign cards exist but aren’t universal; major bank branches (Bank of China, ICBC) are your safest options.

Language: English is spoken at the major tourist sites and at hotels catering to international visitors, but very little outside these environments. Having your hotel address and key destinations written in Chinese characters (or saved on your phone for showing to taxi drivers) is essential. Google Translate’s camera function works surprisingly well on Chinese menus and signs even without a connection if you download the Chinese language pack in advance.

Costs: Xi’an is significantly cheaper than Beijing or Shanghai. A bowl of biang biang noodles costs roughly $1.50–$2. A full yangrou paomo meal at a decent restaurant runs $4–$7. Mid-range hotel rooms within the walled city run $40–$80 per night. Entry to the Terracotta Army Museum costs around $24. The Shaanxi History Museum main galleries are free but timed entry tickets need to be reserved in advance online (increasingly required and genuinely fills up). Budget travelers can eat extremely well, cover all major sites, and stay in decent accommodation for $50–$60 per day. Mid-range comfort bumps that to $100–$130.

Common pitfalls: Unlicensed “guides” near the Terracotta Army site will approach you offering tours at bargain prices — their information is frequently inaccurate and sometimes deliberately misleading. Stick to licensed guides identifiable by official badges issued by the museum. At the Muslim Quarter, be aware that some stalls use scales weighted to overcharge — paying for food by the piece rather than by weight is simpler. Finally, the walled city is larger than it looks on maps; factor in more time than you think you need. Rushing Xi’an doesn’t work. The city rewards slowness.

📷 Featured image by Yux Xiang on Unsplash.